Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks: responses to quantity and location of new resources.

Saprotrophic cord-forming basidiomycetes, with their mycelial networks at the soil/litter interface on the forest floor, play a major role in wood decomposition and nutrient cycling/relocation. Many studies have investigated foraging behaviour of their mycelium, but there is little information on their intelligence. Here, we investigate the effects of relative size of inoculum wood and new wood resource (bait) on the decision of a mycelium to remain in, or migrate from, inoculum to bait using Phanerochaete velutina as a model.

Highly competitive fungi manipulate bacterial communities in decomposing beech wood (Fagus sylvatica).

The bacterial communities in decomposing wood are receiving increased attention, but their interactions with wood-decay fungi are poorly understood. This is the first field study to test the hypothesis that fungi are responsible for driving bacterial communities in beech wood (Fagus sylvatica). A meta-genetic approach was used to characterise bacterial and fungal communities in wood that had been laboratory-colonised with known wood-decay fungi, and left for a year at six woodland sites.

Threesomes destabilise certain relationships: multispecies interactions between wood decay fungi in natural resources.

Understanding interspecific interactions is key to explaining and modelling community development and associated ecosystem function. Most interactions research has focused on pairwise combinations, overlooking the complexity of multispecies communities. This study investigated three-way interactions between saprotrophic fungi in wood and across soil, and indicated that pairwise combinations are often inaccurate predictors of the outcomes of multispecies competition in wood block interactions.

Location, location, location: priority effects in wood decay communities may vary between sites.

Priority effects are known to have a major influence on fungal community development in decomposing wood, but it has not yet been established whether these effects are consistent between different geographical locations. Here, beech (Fagus sylvatica) wood disks that had been pre-colonized with three wood decay basidiomycetes were placed in seven woodland sites with similar characteristics for 12-24 months, and the successor communities profiled using culture-based techniques coupled with amplicon sequencing. On the majority of sites, assembly history differed as a result of primary versus secondary resource capture only (i.

Priority effects during fungal community establishment in beech wood.

Assembly history of fungal communities has a crucial role in the decomposition of woody resources, and hence nutrient cycling and ecosystem function. However, it has not been clearly determined whether the fungal species that arrive first may, potentially, dictate the subsequent pathway of community development, that is, whether there is a priority effect at the species level. We used traditional culture-based techniques coupled with sequencing of amplified genetic markers to profile the fungal communities in beech (Fagus sylvatica) disks that had been pre-colonised separately with nine species from various stages of fungal succession.