The colonization of land by plants appears to have coincided with the appearance of mycorrhiza-like fungi. Over evolutionary time, fungi have maintained their prominent role in the formation of mycorrhizal associations. In addition, however, they have been able to occupy other terrestrial niches of which the decomposition of recalcitrant organic matter is perhaps the most remarkable. This impli...

Fungi inhabit every natural and anthropogenic environment on Earth. They have highly varied life-styles including saprobes (using only dead biomass as a nutrient source), pathogens (feeding on living biomass), and symbionts (co-existing with other organisms). These distinctions are not absolute as many species employ several life styles (e.g. saprobe and opportunistic pathogen, saprobe and myco...

Why some invasive plant species transmogrify from weak competitors at home to strong competitors abroad remains one of the most elusive questions in ecology. Some evidence suggests that disproportionately high densities of some invaders are due to the release of biochemicals that are novel, and therefore harmful, to naive organisms in their new range. So far, such evidence has been restricted t...

Existing models of nutrient transfer in arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses are inadequate as they do not explain the range of real responses seen experimentally. A computer simulation model was used to evaluate the novel hypotheses that mycorrhizal nutrient transfers were based solely on symbionts' internal needs, and that carbon and phosphorus transfers were quantitatively unlinked. To be p...

Final remarks Pollinator-limitation and resource constraints results in only a small proportion of an orchid population giving rise to the subsequent generation. This is further limited, as most orchid populations, particularly in the tropics, are small, due to the fluid nature of the niches they occupy and the availability of mycorrhiza ‘islands’. This combined with low reproductive success re...

Examining the fine-scale spatial structure of fungal populations can tell us much about how individual species reproduce and disperse throughout natural landscapes. Here we study the fine-scale genetic structure of Tricholoma matsutake, a prized edible and medicinal mushroom, by systematic sampling of mycorrhizas within fairy rings in 50-y-old and old-growth forests in two villages. Using singl...

Plants buffer increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations through enhanced growth, but the question whether nitrogen availability constrains the magnitude of this ecosystem service remains unresolved. Synthesizing experiments from around the world, we show that CO2 fertilization is best explained by a simple interaction between nitrogen availability and mycorrhizal association. P...

The characteristics of plant-mycorrhizae associations are known to vary in both time and space, but the ecological consequences of variation in the dynamics of plant-fungus interactions are poorly understood. For example, do plants associate with single fungi or multiple fungi simultaneously, and do the associations persist through a plant's lifetime or do plants support a succession of differe...

Mycorrhizal associations are ubiquitous and form a substantial component of the microbial biomass in forest ecosystems and fluxes of C to these belowground organisms account for a substantial portion of carbon assimilated by forest vegetation. Climate change has been predicted to alter belowground plant-allocated C which may cause compositional shifts in soil microbial communities, and it has b...