Yiming Meng

PhD student
yiming.meng [at] ut.ee

J. Liivi st. 2- 515

I aim to answer the following question during my PhD studies: 1) what are the roles of phylogeny vs environmental conditions in determining the mycorrhizal status of plant species? 2) is there a common set of geographic, environmental or phylogenetic contexts that explains why some plants do not form mycorrhizal symbiosis? 3) do fungal communities associating with plants being always and sometimes mycorrhizal differ in relation to one another and in relation to biotic and abiotic environmental factors? I hope to provide new empirical information about how plant mycorrhizal traits change along environmental gradients and predict mycorrhizal fungal traits and plant communities in changing ecosystems.

My supervisors are Guillermo Bueno, John Davison and Maarja Öpik