Abstract

Drought is one of the important environmental limitations that has caused extreme ecological and economic damage around the globe. With increasing climate change conditions more extreme and frequent drought events are anticipated. Therefore, it is an immediate need to go fully sustainable and protect ecological regions that could possibly control the everlasting climate change. Forests play a pivotal role in environmental stability by sequestering a significant amount of atmospheric carbon above ground and below ground through vegetation and soil fixation. However, forests are continuously threatened by extreme and frequent drought events. This study is designed to improve one of the dominant tree species of Canadian boreal forests; lodgepole pine, by using ectomycorrhizal fungal (ECM) communities. However, in this study, the ecological niche of fungal communities has been considered by comparing ECM communities from two environmentally different regions (drought and non-drought). In addition, fungal diversity was studied and variability has been estimated across sites based on varying soil conditions at different depths. The fungal diversity is significantly varied among sites and disparities have been observed at different soil depths within each site. Besides, the greenhouse experiment on the growth of lodgepole pine seedlings showed significant improvement following the application of both fungal communities under drought stress and optimal growth conditions. However, fungal communities isolated from drought stands showed higher results under drought stress as compared to fungal communities from non-drought stands, while being significantly different under optimal growth conditions as compared to the control treatment (no inoculation). Since the experiment was conducted in the greenhouse setup, it is strongly advised to experiment with these fungal communities under field conditions to verify the outcomes of the study.