Abstract
Abstract Functional traits are widely recognized as a useful framework for testing mechanisms underlying species community assemblage patterns and ecosystem processes. Functional trait studies in the plant and animal literature have burgeoned in the past 20 years, highlighting a need for standardized ways to measure ecologically meaningful traits across taxa and ecosystems. However, standardized measurements of functional traits are lacking for many organisms and ecosystems, including fungi. Basidiomycete wood fungi occur in all forest ecosystems world‐wide, where they are decomposers and also provide food or habitat for other species, or act as tree pathogens. Despite their major role in the functioning of forest ecosystems, the understanding and application of functional traits in studies of communities of wood fungi lags behind other disciplines. As the research field of fungal functional ecology is growing, there is a need for standardized ways to measure fungal traits within and across taxa and spatial scales. This handbook reviews pre‐existing fungal trait measurements, proposes new core fungal traits, discusses trait ecology in fungi and highlights areas for future work on basidiomycete wood fungi. We propose standard and potential future methodologies for collecting traits to be used across studies, ensuring replicability and fostering between‐study comparison. Combining concepts from fungal ecology and functional trait ecology, methodologies covered here can be related to fungal performance within a community and environmental setting. This manuscript is titled “a start with” as we only cover a subset of the fungal community here, with the aim of encouraging and facilitating the writing of handbooks for other members of the macrofungal community, for example, mycorrhizal fungi. A plain language summary is available for this article.
Highlights
Functional traits are widely recognized as a useful framework for answering some of the core questions of community ecology (Götzenberger et al, 2012; Keddy, 1992; Weiher & Keddy, 1995)
As the research field of fungal functional ecology is growing, there is a need for standardized ways to measure fungal traits within and across taxa and spatial scales
Functional traits are widely recognized as a useful framework for answering some of the core questions of community ecology (Götzenberger et al, 2012; Keddy, 1992; Weiher & Keddy, 1995)
Summary
Functional traits are widely recognized as a useful framework for answering some of the core questions of community ecology (Götzenberger et al, 2012; Keddy, 1992; Weiher & Keddy, 1995). Finding the extent of intraspecific variation requires either (1) sampling as many random individuals as possible along well‐defined and unconfounded environmental gradients (Violle et al, 2012) or (2) an experimental approach manipulating micro‐ or mesocosms The traits proposed, their measurement protocols, potential issues and hypotheses of community and/or environmental relevance can be found in Supporting Information Appendix S1. We introduce some basic principles for undertaking fungal trait measurement in basidiomycete wood fungi This includes procedures for sourcing trait values, choosing between field‐ and laboratory‐based measurements, collection of host tree details, and species selection and coverage. These are presented here as they apply to all studies undertaking fungal trait measurement
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