Abstract
Fungi play prominent roles in ecosystem services (e.g., nutrient cycling, decomposition) and thus have increasingly garnered attention in restoration ecology. However, it is unclear how most management decisions impact fungal communities, making it difficult to protect fungal diversity and utilize fungi to improve restoration success. To understand the effects of restoration decisions and environmental variation on fungal communities, we sequenced soil fungal microbiomes from 96 sites across eight experimental Everglades tree islands approximately 15 years after restoration occurred. We found that early restoration decisions can have enduring consequences for fungal communities. Factors experimentally manipulated in 2003–2007 (e.g., type of island core) had significant legacy effects on fungal community composition. Our results also emphasized the role of water regime in fungal diversity, composition, and function. As the relative water level decreased, so did fungal diversity, with an approximately 25% decline in the driest sites. Further, as the water level decreased, the abundance of the plant pathogen–saprotroph guild increased, suggesting that low water may increase plant-pathogen interactions. Our results indicate that early restoration decisions can have long-term consequences for fungal community composition and function and suggest that a drier future in the Everglades could reduce fungal diversity on imperiled tree islands.
Highlights
Fungi play important roles in many ecosystem functions and services, especially those that involve soil [1,2], where they make up an estimated 55–85% of the microbial biomass [3,4]
Our study contributes to this goal by showing that (1) fungal diversity and composition were affected by restoration decision factors that were manipulated on experimental tree islands during their construction, and (2) variation in several important aspects of fungal communities was explained by microhabitat differences in other environmental variables of interest for management, including hydrology and properties of the naturally recruiting plant understory community
This study demonstrates that soil fungal communities on Everglades tree islands can be driven by abiotic and biotic factors, some of which are determined by management decisions
Summary
Fungi play important roles in many ecosystem functions and services, especially those that involve soil [1,2], where they make up an estimated 55–85% of the microbial biomass [3,4]. These fungi are crucial for the decomposition of organic carbon, cycling of nitrogen and phosphorus, and belowground carbon sequestration [1,5,6,7]. Soil fungi indirectly contribute to ecosystem function through their interactions with primary producers. Research has shown that fungal amendment can improve the fertility
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