Resumo

The sugarcane is nowadays the most important crop in the State of São Paulo, serving as the raw material for the production of sugar and ethanol, besides many other by-products. Considering the expansion of agricultural barriers and shifts in field management, such cultivation is under a rearrangement process, aiming a higher productivity and sustainability. In order to achieve that, among other factors, the role of microbial communities present in soils can be essential, supporting the plant development. However, little is known about the microbial community living in soils where sugarcane is cultivated. Hence, this work aimed to evaluate the diversity and abundance of fungi in soils with sugarcane cultivation in the State of São Paulo, in areas under distinct chemical and physical attributes, and distinct management practices. It was also aimed to determine the occurrence of biogeographically patterns in the structuring of such communities. For that, the analysis of the fungal community structure was made by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP), together with the quantification of these communities by real time PCR (qPCR) in 476 soil samples, collected in 11 areas cultivated with sugarcane (mills). Within this dataset, it was found that chemical, physical and management attributes explain higher values of variance within each sampled area, but they explain little about the total variance of data, suggesting the occurrence of biogeographically patterns in fungal communities in this environment. This is confirmed by the statistical significance of the correlation between distance and dissimilarity of fungal communities, supporting the generation of the very first biogeographically maps in such soils. Additionally, the abundance of fungi revealed to be related with sugarcane productivity, indicating this issue as one of the factors modulating the sugarcane productivity in the evaluated areas.