Environmental responses of fruiting fungal communities are phylogenetically structured

Abstract

Through their ephemeral reproductive structures (fruiting bodies), ectomycorrhizal forest soil fungi provide a resource for a plethora of organisms. Thus, resolving what biotic and abiotic factors determine the occurrence and abundance of fruiting bodies is fundamental for understanding the dynamics of forest trophic networks. While the influence of abiotic factors such as moisture and temperature on fungal fruiting are relatively well established, little is known about how these processes interact with the evolutionary history of fungal species to determine when, where, and in which abundance fungal fruiting bodies will emerge. A specific knowledge gap relates to whether species' responses to their environment are phylogenetically structured. Here, we ask whether related fungal taxa respond similarly to climatic factors and forest habitat characteristics, and whether such correlated responses will affect the assembly of fungal fruiting communities. To resolve these questions, we fitted joint species distribution models combining data on the species composition and abundance of fungal fruiting bodies, environmental variation, and phylogenetic relationships among fungal taxa. Our results show that both site‐level forest characteristics (dominant tree species and forest age) and climatic factors related to phenology (effective heat sum) greatly influence the occurrence and abundance of fruiting bodies. More importantly, while different fungal species responded unequally to their shared environment, there was a strong phylogenetic signal in their responses, so that related fungal species tended to fruit under similar environmental conditions. Thus, not only are fruiting bodies short‐lived and patchily distributed, but the availability of similar resources will be further aggregated in time and space. These strong constraints on resource availability for fungus‐associated taxa highlight the potential of fungus‐based networks as a model system for studies on the ecology and evolution of resource–consumer relations in ephemeral systems of high spatiotemporal patchiness.