Mycota of understudied biodiversity hotspots - deep DNA sequencing reveals hyperdiverse communities and strong habitat partitioning along altitudinal gradients in cloud forest communities in Borneo and in the Andes

JOZSEF GEML; NICOLÁS PASTOR; LUIS MORGADO; TATIANA SEMENOVA; EDUARDO R. NOUHRA

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Congreso; Netherlands Annual Ecology Meeting; 2014

Cloud forests are not only among the world´s most biologically important ecosystems with their tremendous biodiversity and high rate of endemism, but they also provide crucial water supplies to human settlements and agricultural areas. Unfortunately, cloud forests are also vulnerable to habitat destruction and climate change, with model-based scenarios predicting substantial decrease in cover in the future. Mount Kinabalu in Borneo and the Yungas forest on the eastern sslopes of the Andes have been known to be particularly rich plant and animal species and both have been designated as UNESCO Biosphere Reserves. Although, based on proportional diversity estimates around the globe, the fungi likely are at least as diverse (probably even more), virtually nothing is known about the true diversity and distribution patterns of fungi in these regions. We carried out Ion Torrent sequencing of ITS2 rDNA from soil samples taken along multiple altitudinal gradients in the Yungas in NW Argentina and on Mount Kinabalu and in the Crocker Range in Malaysian Borneo. The sampled sites represent the all major altitudinal forest types from ca. 500 to 2500 m asl in the Yungas and from 300 to 4000 m asl in Borneo. Our deep sequence data suggests that the sampled communities are very speciesrich, harboring numerous undescribed and/or previously unsequenced lineages. NMDS analyses suggested that fungal community composition correlated strongly with forest type, with many OTUs showing strong preference for a certain elevation zone. Despite the strong altitudinal structuring, fungal diversity were comparable across the different zonal forest types. Several ecological groups showed similar distributional trends in the two regions, e.g., saprobic fungi were more diverse at lower elevations, while root endophytes were more dominant at higher altitudes. On the other hand, there were some differences in the distributional patterns of ectomycorrhizal fungi that may be explained by the differential availability of host trees. Our data offer an unprecedented insight into the high diversity and spatial distribution of fungi in the tropical and subtropical cloud forests.