Wood-inhabiting fungal communities : Opportunities for integration of empirical and theoretical community ecology

Abstract

The interest in studying wood-inhabiting fungal communities has grown in recent years. This interest has mainly been motivated by the important roles of wood-inhabiting fungi in ecosystem functioning (e.g. nutrient cycling) and conservation biology (e.g. their sensitivity to forest management). In this paper, I argue that another important, but yet largely unexplored motivation for studying wood-inhabiting fungal communities, is their potential to advance fundamental community ecology. One major advantage of wood-inhabiting fungi as model systems is that they are organized as spatially well-defined metacommunities, thus conforming to the assumptions of many theoretical frameworks. Another major advantage is that they allow observations and manipulations over large numbers of local communities (habitat patches). After reviewing recent approaches in theoretical community ecology, I discuss how past empirical studies on wood-inhabiting fungal communities relate to community assembly processes, and provide future research directions on how the still unstudied assembly processes could be tackled using wood-inhabiting fungi as a model system.