Fungi in the forest ecosystem: habitats, diversity, and contribution to ecosystem processes

Globally, forests represent highly productive ecosystems that act as carbon sinks where soil organic matter is formed from residuals after biomass decomposition as well as from rhizodeposited carbon. Fungi inhabit various forest habitats: foliage, the wood of living trees, the bark surface, ground vegetation, roots and the rhizosphere, litter, soil, deadwood, rock surfaces, invertebrates, wetlands or the atmosphere, each of which has its own specific features, such as nutrient availability or temporal dynamicy and specific drivers that affect fungal abundance and the composition of their communities as well as the nature of ekosystém processes where fungi participate. Fungi are especially important in those forest habitats where decomposition of plant organic matter takes place and in soil, where they represent the necessary symbionts of trees and other plants, responsible for providing their hosts with nutrition. Many ffungi inhabit or even connect multiple habitats, and are thus incorporated in ekosystem processes in a very complex way. Forests are dynamic on a broad temporal scale with processes ranging from short-term events over seasonal ecosystem dynamics, to long-term stand development after disturbances such as fires or insect outbreaks and microbes respond to and mediate the changes that occur. We are now starting to appreciate the relative role of fungi in the forest microbiome that appears to show that they are largely responsible for plant biomass decomposition and their activity, especially of those taxa that are associated with root of host plants, show the peak of activity during the summer vegetation season in the temperate and boreal forests. Among temperate and boreal biomes, forests seem to be those most dependent on fungal activity.

Baldrian P. 2017: Forest microbiome: Diversity, complexity and dynamics. FEMS Microbiology Reviews 41:109-130.

Žifčáková L et al. 2017: Feed in summer, rest in winter: microbial carbon utilization in forest topsoil. Microbiome 5:122.