Microorganisms play a crucial role in the biological decomposition of plant litter in terrestrial ecosystems. Due to the permanently changing litter quality during decomposition, studies of both fungi and bacteria at a fine taxonomic resolution are required during the whole process. Here we investigated microbial community succession in decomposing leaf litter of temperate beech forest using pyrotag sequencing of the bacterial 16S and the fungal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) rRNA genes. Our results reveal that both communities underwent rapid changes. Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Bacteroidetes dominated over the entire study period, but their taxonomic composition and abundances changed markedly among sampling dates. The fungal community also changed dynamically as decomposition progressed, with ascomycete fungi being increasingly replaced by basidiomycetes. We found a consistent and highly significant correlation between bacterial richness and fungal richness (R = 0.76, P< 0.001) and community structure (RM antel  = 0.85, P < 0.001), providing evidence of coupled dynamics in the fungal and bacterial communities. A network analysis highlighted nonrandom co-occurrences among bacterial and fungal taxa as well as a shift in the cross-kingdom co-occurrence pattern of their communities from the early to the later stages of decomposition. During this process, macronutrients, micronutrients, C:N ratio and pH were significantly correlated with the fungal and bacterial communities, while bacterial richness positively correlated with three hydrolytic enzymes important for C, N and P acquisition. Overall, we provide evidence that the complex litter decay is the result of a dynamic cross-kingdom functional succession.

Human-induced biodiversity change impairs ecosystem functions crucial to human well-being. However, the consequences of this change for ecosystem multifunctionality are poorly understood beyond effects of plant species loss, particularly in regions with high biodiversity across trophic levels. Here we adopt a multitrophic perspective to analyze how biodiversity affects multifunctionality in biodiverse subtropical forests. We consider 22 independent measurements of nine ecosystem functions central to energy and nutrient flow across trophic levels. We find that individual functions and multifunctionality are more strongly affected by the diversity of heterotrophs promoting decomposition and nutrient cycling, and by plant functional-trait diversity and composition, than by tree species richness. Moreover, cascading effects of higher trophic-level diversity on functions originating from lower trophic-level processes highlight that multitrophic biodiversity is key to understanding drivers of multifunctionality. A broader perspective on biodiversity-multifunctionality relationships is crucial for sustainable ecosystem management in light of non-random species loss and intensified biotic disturbances under future environmental change.

Fungi play vital roles in the decomposition of deadwood due to their secretion of various enzymes that break down plant cell-wall complexes. The compositions of woodinhabiting fungal (WIF) communities change over the course of the decomposition process as the remaining mass of wood decreases and both abiotic and biotic conditions of the wood significantly change. It is currently not resolved which substrate-related factors govern these changes in WIF communities and whether such changes influence the deadwood decomposition rate. Here we report a study on fungal richness and community structure in deadwood of Norway spruce and European beech in temperate forest ecosystems using 454 pyrosequencing. Our aims were to disentangle the factors that correspond to WIF community composition and to investigate the links between fungal richness, taxonomically-resolved fungal identity, and microbial-mediated ecosystem functions and processes by analyzing physico-chemical wood properties, lignin-modifying enzyme activities and wood decomposition rates. Unlike fungal richness, we found significant differences in community structure between deadwood of different tree species. The composition of WIF communities was related to the physico-chemical properties of the deadwood substrates. Decomposition rates and the activities of ligninmodifying enzymes were controlled by the succession of the fungal communities and competition scenarios rather than fungal OTU richness. Our results provide further insights into links between fungal community structure and microbialmediated ecosystem functions and processes.

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This study is unique as it compares traditional and high-resolution culture-independent approaches using the same set of samples to study the saprotrophic fungi on Vitis vinifera. We identified the saprotrophic communities of table grape (Red Globe) and wine grape (Carbanate Gernischet) in China using both traditional and culture-independent techniques. The traditional approach used direct observations based on morphology, single spore isolation and phylogenetic analysis yielding 45 taxa which 19 were commonly detected in both cultivars. The same set of samples were then used for Illumina sequencing which analyzed ITS1 sequence data and detected 226 fungal OTUs, of which 176 and 189 belong to the cultivars Carbanate Gernischet and Red Globe, respectively. There were 139 OTUs shared between the two V. vinifera cultivars and 37 and 50 OTUs were specific to Carbanate Gernischet and Red Globe cultivars respectively. In the Carbanate Gernischet cultivar, Ascomycota accounted for 77% of the OTUs and in Red Globe, almost all sequenced were Ascomycota. The fungal taxa overlap at the genus and species level between the traditional and culture-independent approach was relatively low. In the traditional approach we were able to identify the taxa to species level, while in the culture-independent method we were frequently able to identify the taxa to family or genus level. This is remarkable as we used the same set of samples collected in China for both approaches. We recommend the use of traditional techniques to accurately identify taxa. Culture-independent method can be used to get a better understanding about the organisms that are present in a host in its natural environment. We identified primary and secondary plant pathogens and endophytes in the saprotrophic fungal communities, which support previous observations, that dead plant material in grape vineyards can be the primary sources of disease. Finally, based on present and previous findings, we provide a worldwide checklist of 905 fungal taxa on Vitis species, which includes their mode of life and distribution.

Wood-inhabiting fungi have essential roles in the regulation of carbon stocks and nutrient cycling in forest ecosystems. However, knowledge pertaining to wood-inhabiting fungi is only fragmentary and controversial. Here we established a large-scale deadwood experiment with 11 tree species to investigate diversity and tree species preferences of wood-inhabiting fungi using next-generation sequencing. Our results contradict existing knowledge based on sporocarp surveys and challenge current views on their distribution and diversity in temperate forests. Analyzing α-, β- and γ-diversity, we show that diverse fungi colonize deadwood at different spatial scales. Specifically, coniferous species have higher α- and γ-diversity than the majority of analyzed broadleaf species, but two broadleaf species showed the highest β-diversity. Surprisingly, we found nonrandom co-occurrence (P<0.001) and strong tree species preferences of wood-inhabiting fungi, especially in broadleaf trees (P<0.01). Our results indicate that the saprotrophic fungal community is more specific to tree species than previously thought.