Fungi typically live in highly diverse communities composed of multiple ecological guilds. Although high-throughput sequencing has greatly increased the ability to quantify the diversity of fungi in environmental samples, researchers currently lack a simple and consistent way to sort large sequence pools into ecologically meaningful categories. We address this issue by introducing FUNGuild, a t...

Land use and land use change affect deadwood amount, quality and associated biodiversity in forest ecosystems. Old growth or virgin forests, which are exceptionally rare in temperate Europe harbor more deadwood and associated fungal species than managed forests. Whether and how more recent abandonment of management, to reestablish more natural forests, affects deadwood amount and fungal diversi...

The Janzen-Connell (JC) hypothesis provides a conceptual framework for explaining the maintenance of tree diversity in tropical forests. Its central tenet-that recruits experience high mortality near conspecifics and at high densities-assumes a degree of host specialization in interactions between plants and natural enemies. Studies confirming JC effects have focused primarily on spatial distri...

In temperate and boreal forest ecosystems, nitrogen (N) limitation of tree metabolism is alleviated by ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi. As forest soils age, the primary source of N in soil switches from inorganic (NH4 (+) and NO3 (-)) to organic (mostly proteins). It has been hypothesized that ECM fungi adapt to the most common N source in their environment, which implies that fungi growing in olde...

1 Terrestrial Ecology Group. Environmental Reseach Division, Argonne National Laboratory, 9700 S. Cass Avenue, Argonne, Illinois 60439, USA 2 Center for Forest Mycology, USA Forest Service, Forest Products Laboratory*, Box 1377, Luquillo. Puerto Rico 00773-1377, USA * The Forest Products Laboratory is maintained in coop eration with the University of Wisconsin. This paper was written and and pr...

In order to study the diversity of the leaf litter and aerial litter filamentous fungi, sample were collected from a semi-deciduous seasonal forest located in the Miguel Calmon, state of Bahia, Brazil. Leaf litter and aerial litter samples were collected. Samples were placed in moist chambers. Five conidial fungi were described for the first time in Brazil. Comments about their specimens and di...

In Eastern Spain, almond trees have been cultivated in terraced orchards for centuries, forming an integral part of the Mediterranean forest scene. In the last decades, orchards have been abandoned due to changes in society. This study investigates effects of changes in land use from forest to agricultural land and the posterior land abandonment on soil microbial community, and the influence of...

The genera of Phytophthora and Pythium are two of the very destructive groups of plant pathogens in the world (Plaats-Niterink, 1981; Erwin and Ribeiro, 1996). They attack mainly mature plants and young seedlings, respectively, of forest, fruit, vegetable, flower, and ornamental species. These two groups of fungi are classified in the family Pythiaceae of the Oomycetes, which is excluded from t...

Araucaria angustifolia (Bert.) O. Ktze., a native forest tree from Brazil, is under extinction risk. This tree depends on arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi for growth and development, especially in tropical low-P soils but, despite being a conifer, Araucaria does not form ectomycorrhiza, but only the arbuscular endomycorrhiza. This study aimed at surveying data on the spore density and root coloniza...

Fallow deer did not prefer either of the two main canopy species (silver beech, Nothofagus menziesii, and radiata pine, Pinus radiata), or any of the common indigenous shrubs, ferns, herbs and monocotyledons in three habitat types (beech, shrub-hardwood, and exotic forest). They did prefer all the common sub canopy tree species, and these comprised the bulk of diet in all habitats. Broadleaf (G...