2.3. Bioinformatic Analysis
Raw sequence reads were demultiplexed and further processed with QIIME2 (version 2020.2) [The dataset was rarefied at a sampling depth of 4500 before computing diversity metrics to avoid bias. Alpha diversity indices were estimated by the Shannon index (a quantitative measure of community diversity), observed features (a qualitative measure of community richness), and Gini-Simpson (a measure of community evenness). Beta diversity was calculated using Bray–Curtis dissimilarity index. Analysis and visualization of fungal communities were conducted in R (version 4.1.0).