RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 High resilience of the mycorrhizal community to prescribed seasonal burnings in a Mediterranean woodland
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.06.10.141671
DO 10.1101/2020.06.10.141671
A1 Stav Livne-Luzon
A1 Hagai Shemesh
A1 Yagil Osem
A1 Yohay Carmel
A1 Hen Migael
A1 Yael Avidan
A1 Anat Tsafrir
A1 Sydney I. Glassman
A1 Thomas D. Bruns
A1 Ofer Ovadia
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/06/12/2020.06.10.141671.abstract
AB Fire effects on ecosystems range from destruction of aboveground vegetation to direct and indirect effects on belowground microorganisms. Although variation in such effects is expected to be related to fire severity, another potentially important and poorly understood factor is the effects of fire seasonality on soil microorganisms. We carried out a large-scale field experiment examining the effects of spring versus autumn burns on the community composition of soil fungi in a typical Mediterranean woodland. Although the intensity and severity of our prescribed burns were largely consistent between the two burning seasons, we detected differential fire season effects on the composition of the soil fungal community, driven by changes in the saprotrophic fungal guild. The community composition of ectomycorrhizal fungi, assayed both in pine seedling bioassays and from soil sequencing, appeared to be resilient to the variation inflicted by seasonal fires. Since changes in the soil saprotrophic fungal community can directly influence carbon emission and decomposition rates, we suggest that regardless of their intensity and severity, seasonal fires may cause changes in ecosystem functioning.Funding This research was co-supported by the United States-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF Grant 2012081) and Tel-Hai College.Conflicts of interest/Competing interests We declare no conflicts of interest and that this material has not been submitted for publication elsewhere.Ethics approval Not applicableConsent to participate Not applicableConsent for publication Not applicableAvailability of data and material Sequences were submitted to the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive under accession numbers SRRXXX◻SRRXXX.Code availability Not applicableAuthors’ contributions OO HS TB YO YC conceived and designed the experiment. SSL YA HM AT performed the experiment. SIG provided the pipeline scripts, and guidance in bioinformatics work and analyses. SLL OO HS wrote the paper and analyzed the data, and all authors contributed substantially to revisions.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.