Abstract
Soil fungi are vital for regulating ecosystem carbon balance and productivity, by driving processes related to soil carbon and nutrient cycling. The rate and capacity of fungi-mediated processes are linked to fungal biomass dynamics and identifying the drivers of fungal biomass is important for predicting ecosystem responses to environmental changes. Here, ergosterol-based fungal biomass estimates and ITS2-based fungal community composition profiles were used to assess biomass of fungal guilds. Effects of forest management (thinning), environmental factors (soil chemical properties, microclimate, weather and forest stand composition) and season were related to the fungal biomass dynamics to identify the guild-specific drivers of biomass. Biomass of most fungal guilds increased with nutrient availability (nitrogen and potassium in particular) and decreased with forest thinning, and variation in total biomass was mainly driven by variation in mycorrhizal biomass. Most fungal guilds reached a minimum in biomass during summer except for mycorrhizal and root-associated ascomycetes, which instead reached a minimum during winter. Mycorrhizal fungi and root-associated ascomycetes displayed similar spatiotemporal variability in biomass. Yeasts and moulds were the only fungi displaying strong linkages with microclimate, whereas pathogenic and moss-associated fungi largely diverged in their responses to the environmental factors. The results of our study highlight that environmental factors related to the availability of soil nutrients may have an overall stronger effect on variation in biomass of fungal guilds in Mediterranean Pinus pinaster forests than direct influences of microclimate, weather and forest management.
Highlights
Forests are major reservoirs for terrestrial carbon (C) and are a major component of the global primary production (Pan et al 2011)
Over control and thinned plots, fungal biomass varied over the season and biomass of mycorrhizal fungi and root-associated ascomycetes reached a minimum in February, whereas fungi from other guilds reached a seasonal minimum in August (Table 2)
Our study shows that biomass of fungal guilds in Mediterranean P. pinaster forests are primarily driven by environmental factors related to soil conditions, in particular content of N and K in soil
Summary
Forests are major reservoirs for terrestrial carbon (C) and are a major component of the global primary production (Pan et al 2011). In forests, soil fungi contribute extensively to processes regulating soil C and nutrient cycles, affecting the. Biology and Fertility of Soils to improve our understanding of how ecosystem processes and functions may shift under climate change. Soil physical and chemical factors interact, shaping the soil microbiome and influencing the reciprocal exchange of resources between plants and fungal communities which feedback on ecosystem functions and responses to climate change (Reynolds et al 2003; Putten et al 2013). The links between fungal community responses to environmental changes and ecosystem processes remain unclear (Treseder et al 2012; Koide et al 2014), and there is a lack of understanding of how effects of microclimate and soil chemistry relate to fungal biomass dynamics and related processes
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