Some like it wet : rainfall and fungi in the Scottish pinewoods

Post date: Mar 11, 2013 4:18:07 PM

It rains a lot in Scotland, as anyone who has attempted a camping holiday here will attest to. However, it rains a lot more on the west coast than it does on the east coast, so a camping holiday in Oban is likely to be much less pleasant than one in Edinburgh. In fact, areas on the west coast get up to 4 times as much rain as the east coast every year.

So what does this mean for fungi? Do some fungi like the rain more than others? If so, we might expect different fungi to grow in the west and east of the country, as these areas have different amounts of rainfall. To test this idea we decided to survey fungi from across Scotland to see whether we found different fungi in different areas of Scotland. We decided to look at just one type of habitat, the native pinewoods, to make sure different habitat types did not affect the results. To see whether other variables could also affect fungi we collected information on temperature, nitrogen deposition and soil characteristics as well as the amount of rainfall for each site. In total we looked at the fungi in 15 native pinewoods and identified them using DNA sequencing of the fungi living in symbiosis with the roots of the pine trees (ectomycorrhizal fungi).

We found that the fungi growing in pinewoods with lots of rainfall were in fact different from those in pinewoods with little rainfall, showing that some fungi like it wet while others like it dry. This is important to understand, as climate change is predicted to lead to changes in the amount of rainfall we get in Scotland and might cause changes in the distribution of fungal species. The next step is to identify the optimal rainfall conditions for important fungi, so that we can predict their distributions in the future.