Successive droughts have resulted in extensive tree mortality in the southwestern United States. Recovery of these areas is dependent on the survival and recruitment of young trees. For trees that rely on ectomycorrhizal fungi ( We used tree‐focused and stand‐scale measurements to examine the impact of pinyon pine mortality on the performance of surviving juvenile trees and the potential for mutualism limitation of seedling establishment via altered Mature pinyon mortality did not affect the survival of juvenile pinyons, but increased their growth. At both tree and stand scales, high pinyon mortality had no effect on the abundance of These findings suggest that whereas mature pinyon mortality led to competitive release for established juvenile pinyons, changes in
Whether niche processes, like environmental filtering, or neutral processes, like dispersal limitation, are the primary forces driving community assembly is a central question in ecology. Here, we use a natural experimental system of isolated tree “islands” to test whether environment or geography primarily structures fungal community composition at fine spatial scales. This system consists of isolated pairs of two distantly related, congeneric pine trees established at varying distances from each other and the forest edge, allowing us to disentangle the effects of geographic distance vs. host and edaphic environment on associated fungal communities. We identified fungal community composition with Illumina sequencing of
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10047356
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley-Blackwell
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Molecular Ecology
- Volume:
- 26
- Issue:
- 24
- ISSN:
- 0962-1083
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 6960-6973
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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