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Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are crucial to plants and vice versa, but little is known about the factors linking the community structure of the two groups. We investigated the association between AMF and the plant community structure in the nearest neighborhood of Festuca brevipila in a semiarid grassland with steep environmental gradients, using high-throughput sequencing of the Glomeromycotina (former Glomeromycota). We focused on the Passenger, Driver and Habitat hypotheses: (i) plant communities drive AMF (passenger); (ii) AMF communities drive the plants (driver); (iii) the environment shapes both communities causing covariation. The null hypothesis is that the two assemblages are independent and this study offers a spatially explicit novel test of it in the field at multiple, small scales. The AMF community consisted of 71 operational taxonomic units, the plant community of 47 species. Spatial …