Abstract
Metabarcoding of environmental samples is nowadays an established method in biodiversity research. When it comes to studying fungal populations in various ecotypes, fruit body inventories are the traditional method to assess the diversity of fungal communities. In this study, both methods—metabarcoding of soil samples and a traditional fruit body inventory—were conducted on 144 sample plots in an altitudinal gradient in the Bavarian Forest (Germany) and the results were compared. Metabarcoding detected significantly more species than the traditional fruit body inventory. The majority of taxa recorded in the fruit body inventory belonged to the Basidiomycota, whereas in the metabarcoding data, the distribution of species between Basidiomycota and Ascomycota was approximately balanced. Species of several orders forming inconspicuous or hypogeous fruit bodies were detected only by metabarcoding, while several wood decomposers were recorded only in the fruit body inventory. The proportion of detected wood-colonising species with melanized spores was considerably higher with metabarcoding than with the fruit body inventory, where more than 70% of recorded wood-colonisers had hyaline spores. Based on the metabarcoding data, a decline of species richness with increasing altitude was evident, but this was not visible in the fruit body inventory data. Detrended correspondence analyses yielded similar results for relative species community similarities with both survey methods.
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Data availability
Survey data of metabarcoding, including coordinates and collection dates are archived in NCBI BioSamples under Submission ID SUB11928789 and SUB9332799.The datasets generated by the fruit body inventory or analysed during the current study available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Finn Wahl (Bavarian State Institute of Forestry, Freising, Germany) for assistance with trait mapping, Johannes Matt (Nature Park Bavarian Forest) for assistance in the field work, Theresa M. L. Janssen and Gerasimos Gkoutselis (University of Bayreuth, Dept. of Mycology) for assistance in the laboratory. Furthermore, we want to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the manuscript.
Funding
This study was conducted within the research project “Höhengradient” funded by the Forest Climate Fund, sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture and the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, Germany (References: 22WC412201, 22WC412203).
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This project was designed by AS, MB and GR. The fruit body monitoring campaigns were designed by MB and the sampling campaigns and lab workflow for the metabarcoding part by GR and JH. Metabarcoding samples were collected by DO and processed by JH who also analysed the sequence data. The combined analysis of both datasets was conducted by MB and AS. The manuscript was drafted by MB and AS with additions of JH and further elaborated by all co-authors. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Communicated by Yusuf Akhter.
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Blaschke, M., Siemonsmeier, A., Harjes, J. et al. Comparison of survey methods for fungi using metabarcoding and fruit body inventories in an altitudinal gradient. Arch Microbiol 205, 269 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03606-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03606-9