Data for: Impacts of large herbivores on mycorrhizal fungal communities across the Arctic
Data deposited in association with article to be published in the journal: Ecography. Fungal DNA was extracted from soil samples collected at herbivore exclosure experiments in 15 sites around the Arctic to evaluate the impact of large mammalian herbivores on mycorrhizal fungal communities. The data includes DNA sequence reads amplified using ITS1m-LR5 and SSU515fngs-AML2 long-read primer pairs targeting general fungal sequences and arbuscular mycorrhizae, respectively. Sequences were taxonomically assigned through the UNITE database using PlutoF, and the MaarjAM database and assigned to fungal guild using FUNguild. The pipeline from trimmed, demultiplexed sequence reads to taxonomic and functional assignment is included in the Rscript "EcographySubmission_SynthesisScript.R". Soil properties, date of exclosure establishment, and general metadata is included in the file "MetaData.csv", and percent plant functional type cover is included for 11 sites in the file "Cover_data.csv". Raw sequence reads were deposited in the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) under the title "Impacts of large herbivores on mycorrhizal fungal communities across the Arctic".
Brachmann, C. G., Ryberg, M., Furneaux, B. R., Rosling, A., Ou, T., Ekblad, E., Barrio, I. C., Bret-Harte, M. S., Fritze, H., Gough, L., Hollister, R. D., Jónsdóttir, I. S., Kalttopää, O., Lindén, E., Mäkiranta, P., Olofsson, J., Partanen, R., Reid, K. A., Sokolov, A., Abdulmanova, S., Sujuala, M. S., Sundqvist, M., Suominen, O., Tweedie, C. E., Young, A., and Björk, R. G. Impacts of large herbivores on mycorrhizal fungal communities across the Arctic. Ecography [accepted], 2025.
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Importance of trophic interactions for mycorrhizal dynamics across the Arctic
The expansion of shrubs in the Arctic is likely to have global implications. However, the current ideas about the effects and feedbacks of shrub expansion are oversimplified, as they are based upon the ecological features of tall deciduous species only (such as reduced albedo and an increased input of high quality litter). The fact that several studies also show a strong increase of evergreen shrubs across the Arctic, in some cases aided by selective herbivory, has been largely overlooked. Unlike ectomycorrhizal (EcM) deciduous shrubs, a majority of arctic evergreen shrubs form ericoid mycorrhizal (ErM) associations, which has contrasting implication for C dynamics. By utilizing a Pan-Arctic approach using long-term herbivore exclusion experiments at multiple sites across the Arctic we will: 1) determine the production and turnover of extramatrical mycelia (EMM) biomass at multiple sites across the Arctic in relation to mammalian herbivory; 2) determine how mammalian herbivory affects soil fungal and EMM community dynamics across the Arctic; 3) define the soil fungal and EMM community dynamics under ErM and EcM shrubs and separate the ´active community´ contributing to mycelia production; and 4) disentangle the effect of ErM and EcM shrubs on ecosystem C dynamics. Thus, we will detect key linkages across trophic levels (from the large herbivore to the soil microbes) and test how these hypothesis hold on a circumpolar scale.
Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education program
W. Garfield Weston Award in Northern Research
Pertaining to tundra found north of the Arctic Circle.
[N. Vassilev] Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi is an important group of soil microorganisms which form beneficialsymbiotic associations with roots with a wide range of plants thus improving plant growth, nutritionand health...
[Henderson's] n. type of mycorrhiza in which the fungal hyphae form a sup­erﬁcial covering and do not extensively penetrate the root. It is found on both coniferous and broadleaved forest trees, the infecting fungi being chieﬂy higher basidiomycetes.