Abstract
Despite the important role of wood-inhabiting fungi (WIF) in deadwood decomposition, our knowledge of the factors shaping the dynamics of their species richness and community composition is scarce. This is due to limitations regarding the resolution of classical methods used for characterizing WIF communities and to a lack of well-replicated long-term experiments with sufficient numbers of tree species. Here, we used a large scale experiment with logs of 11 tree species at an early stage of decomposition, distributed across three regions of Germany, to identify the factors shaping WIF community composition and Operational Taxonomic Unit (OTU) richness using next generation sequencing. We found that tree species identity was the most significant factor, corresponding to (P < 0.001) and explaining 10% (representing 48% of the explainable variance) of the overall WIF community composition. The next important group of variables were wood-physicochemical properties, of which wood pH was the only factor that consistently corresponded to WIF community composition. For overall WIF richness patterns, we found that approximately 20% of the total variance was explained by wood N content, location, tree species identity and wood density. It is noteworthy that the importance of determinants of WIF community composition and richness appeared to depend greatly on tree species group (broadleaved vs. coniferous) and it differed between the fungal phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota.
Highlights
Deadwood is an important structural component of forest ecosystems and an essential part of the nutrient cycle (Rajala et al, 2012; Stokland et al, 2012; Purahong et al, 2017; Herrmann and Bauhus, 2018)
Wood density was lowest in P. abies and highest in F. sylvatica, Quercus spp., C. betulus and F. excelsior
When considering the range of variation in measured woodphysicochemical properties, we found that the values for the different tree species partially overlapped and displayed a gradient that enabled us to separate the effects of woodphysicochemical properties from those of the tree species identity (Figure 1)
Summary
Deadwood is an important structural component of forest ecosystems and an essential part of the nutrient cycle (Rajala et al, 2012; Stokland et al, 2012; Purahong et al, 2017; Herrmann and Bauhus, 2018). Apart from saprotrophs, WIF include other functional groups inhabiting deadwood such as, ectomycorrhizal, lichenised, mycoparasitic and plant pathogenic fungi (Purahong et al, 2017, 2018a). Due to their importance for biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, they have been increasingly studied in recent years (Seibold et al, 2015; Bauhus et al, 2018)
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