Native and exotic grasses share generalist foliar fungi in a Canterbury high country grassland

Abstract

Communities of foliar fungal pathogens and endophytes can influence the success and impacts of exotic plants. A key unresolved question concerns how these foliar fungal communities are structured, including whether they systematically differ between native and exotic plants, or are influenced by plant phylogeny and host abundance. To address these questions, we used culturing and Sanger sequencing to characterise the culturable foliar fungal communities of three native and seven exotic grass species that co-occurred in a high-country grassland in Canterbury, Aotearoa New Zealand.