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Inter-annual Persistence of Canopy Fungi Driven by Abundance Despite High Spatial Turnover

  • Fungal Microbiology
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Abstract

While it is now well established that fungal community composition varies spatially at a variety of scales, temporal turnover of fungi is less well understood. Here we studied inter-annual community compositional changes of fungi in a rainforest tree canopy environment. We tracked fungal community shifts over 3 years in three substrate types (live bryophytes, dead bryophytes, and host tree bark) and compared these changes to amounts of community turnover seen at small spatial scales in the same system. The effect of substrate type on fungal community composition was stronger than that of sampling year, which was very small but significant. Although levels of temporal turnover varied among substrates, with greater turnover in live bryophytes than other substrates, the amount of turnover from year to year was comparable to what is seen at spatial distances between 5 and 9 cm for the same substrate. Stability of communities was largely driven by a few fungi with high relative abundances. A majority of fungal occurrences were at low relative abundances (≤ 0.1%). These fungi tended to be short lived and persisted to following years ≤ 50% of the time, depending on substrate. Their presence and persistence are likely impacted by stochastic processes like dispersal limitation and disturbance. Most samples contained only one or a few fungi at high relative abundance (≥ 10%) that persisted half or more of the time. These more abundant and persistent fungi are expected to have sustained functional interactions within the canopy ecosystem.

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Data Availability

The DNA sequence data generated and analyzed during this study are available in NCBI SRA accession PRJNA762332. Scripts used for data analysis and figure construction can be accessed at https://github.com/k-cook-fun/Tapanti-fungi-temporal

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Funding

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DEB-1355155. High-performance computing resources used in the work was provided by the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing, supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Castetter Hall 1480, MSC03-2020, 219 Yale Blvd NE, Albuquerque, NM, 87131-0001, USA

    Kel Cook & D. Lee Taylor

  2. Department of Biology, University of Hawai’i at Manoa, 2538 McCarthy Mall, Edmondson Hall 216, Honolulu, HI, 96822, USA

    Andrew D. Taylor

  3. Department of Plant and Soil Science, Texas Tech University, Bayer Plant Science Building, Room 219, 2911 15th Street, Mail Stop 2122, Lubbock, TX, 79409-2122, USA

    Jyotsna Sharma

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  1. Kel Cook
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  2. Andrew D. Taylor
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All authors contributed to study conception and design and sample collection. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Kel Cook. All authors reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors read and approved of the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kel Cook.

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Cook, K., Taylor, A.D., Sharma, J. et al. Inter-annual Persistence of Canopy Fungi Driven by Abundance Despite High Spatial Turnover. Microb Ecol 86, 261–270 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-022-02104-7

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