Fungal Community Succession Under Environmental Pollution and Its Ecological Effects

With the acceleration of industrialization and urbanization, heavy metals, organic substances including emerging pollutants, and various types of combined pollution continue to disturb environmental ecosystems such as soils and water bodies. Fungi are key decomposers and functional microbiota in these ecosystems, and their community composition, species diversity, and spatiotemporal succession patterns are therefore highly sensitive to environmental stress. Environmental pollution drives the succession of fungal communities, leading to shifts in dominant species, community reconstruction, and altered symbiotic relationships, and it changes both the process and the direction of community succession. At the same time, fungal community succession generates important ecological effects through organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling, pollution remediation, and symbiotic interactions with vegetation, thereby regulating the stability, self-purification, and restoration capacity of ecosystems.Research on this topic can systematically clarify the evolution of fungal communities, species interactions, and metabolic regulation under complex pollution stress, and reveal the underlying molecular and ecological mechanisms by which fungal groups tolerate, acclimate, and co-adapt to multiple pollution stresses. The resulting findings can provide core theoretical support for developing in-situ ecological restoration technologies for heavy metal- and organic compound-contaminated sites, for screening remediation strains, and for the targeted construction of functional microbial communities. They can also offer scientific and practical references for conserving soil microbial biodiversity in damaged areas, reconstructing degraded ecosystem structures, and maintaining long-term ecological function. This will further advance the theoretical framework of fungal ecology under pollution stress and enrich the knowledge base for the bioremediation of contaminated sites.This Research Topic welcomes research papers focusing on fungal succession behaviour and ecological responses under environmental pollution stress. We invite scholars to systematically explore the ecological response patterns and succession mechanisms of fungal communities across different types of environmental pollution scenarios. We particularly encourage innovative research on the response strategies, adaptation mechanisms, and ecological functional evolution of fungi under differentiated pollution stress, with the aim of strengthening the basic theoretical framework of fungal responses in pollution ecology and addressing gaps in previous research.Themes of interest include, but are not limited to:Fungal community structure, diversity, and succession under heavy metal, organic, or combined pollutionMolecular and ecological mechanisms of fungal tolerance, acclimation, and co-adaptation to pollution stressFungal roles in pollution remediation, nutrient cycling, and organic matter decompositionFungal–plant symbiotic interactions in contaminated environmentsScreening of remediation strains and targeted construction of functional fungal communities Topic editors: Yong Liu, Junjun Chang, Huiping Dai Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/83532/fungal-community-succession-under-environmental-pollution-and-its-ecological-effects