Figure caption
Figure 1. Ruellia nudiflora individuals in a) Rural
Sites (RS), b) Open Urban Sites (OUS), and c) Deep Urban Sites (DUS) in
Mérida City and nearby rural areas. To see the distribution of sampled
sites see Fig. S1.
Figure 2. Contrast between urban and rural concentration of a)
N, b) P, and c) K, the more relevant macronutrients driving plant-AMF
interaction (Heikham et al. , 2009; Salvioli di Fossalunga &
Novero, 2019). d) AMF-colonization rates (± SE) of Ruellia
nudiflora by AMF, e) spore density in 100g, and f) diversity Shannon
index in R. nudiflora rhizospheric soil collected in rural (RS),
open urban (OUS), and deep urban (DUS) environments. n.s. indicate no
significance, and different letters indicate significant difference
(P < 0.05).
Figure 3. Biplots of the first two principal components
summarizing variation in a) soil properties and b) plant root
morphological attributes, for RS (green), OUS (blue), and DUS (orange)
environments. Soil PCA (PCsoil) (a) used recorded
information at site level (nsite = 60), while root PCA
(PCroot) (b) depicted included information at plant
level (nplant= 201).
Figure 4. Association between AMF-colonization rate in R.
nudilfora roots and the Z-scores for the first principal component
(PC1soil) from the soil principal component analysis
(PCA) in RS (green), OUS (blue), and DUS (orange) environments.
Independent linear models were performed for each environment.
Figure 5. Sequential Equation Modeling for soil properties and
AMF-colonization rates of Ruellia nudiflora . Solid and dashed
lines indicate the positive and negative standardized paths,
respectively. Path coefficients for RS (green arrows), OUS (blue
arrows), and DUS (orange arrows) environments were reported together
when detected significantly different by a multigroup test (see
methods). Asterisks (*) denote path coefficients that are significantly
different from 0. Different letters indicate significant differences
between path coefficients. The SEM showed a good overall fit
(χ22 = 2.661, P =0.264; CFI = 0.99; RMSEA = 0.074; SRMR = 0.053), as well as a good fit
for RS (χ22 = 0.883, P =0.643; CFI = 1.0; RMSEA = 0; SRMR = 0.046), DUS
(χ22 = 1.211, P = 0.546;
CFI = 1.0; RMSEA = 0; SRMR = 0.046), and OUS
(χ22 = 3.287, P =0.193; CFI = 0.00; RMSEA = 0.179; SRMR = 0.092).