Historical and future spatially-explicit climate change impacts on mycorrhizal and saprotrophic macrofungal productivity in Mediterranean pine forests

Abstract

Fungi are responsible for many of the processes that occur in natural ecosystems and largely determine forest ecosystem dynamics, such as the ability of trees to access limiting nutrients and sequester carbon. Understanding and predicting climate change impacts on fungal dynamics over large scales is key in order to gain further insights into the effects of global change on natural ecosystem functioning and related ecosystem services. In this study, we use predictive models based on machine learning algorithms to estimate, in a spatially explicit way, the historical and future (1976–2100) evolution of mycorrhizal and saprotrophic macrofungal productivity in Mediterranean forest areas under climate change scenarios. The greatest changes in total productivity, as well as mycorrhizal fungi, are predicted to occur in subalpine and montane pine forests, where fungal productivity is estimated to decrease, and will be more pronounced under climate change scenarios with higher expected increase in temperature. In contrast to mycorrhizal species, saprotrophic fungi could benefit from pronounced changes in climate and increase their productivity in supra- and mesomediterranean regions at mid-range elevations. Moreover, we estimated that fungal productivity has also changed historically in some scattered areas where changes in climate over the years may have led to a decrease in productivity. This study contributes to raising awareness on the need for anticipating potential global change impacts on this key element of ecosystem functioning, and for deploying possible management policies oriented toward maintaining the important role of fungal productivity in both climate change mitigation and adaptation.