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Home-Field Advantage in Wood Decomposition Is Mainly Mediated by Fungal Community Shifts at “Home” Versus “Away”

  • Soil Microbiology
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Abstract

The home-field advantage (HFA) hypothesis has been used intensively to study leaf litter decomposition in various ecosystems. However, the HFA in woody substrates is still unexplored. Here, we reanalyzed and integrated existing datasets on various groups of microorganisms collected from natural deadwood of two temperate trees, Fagus sylvatica and Picea abies, from forests in which one or other of these species dominates but where both are present. Our aims were (i) to test the HFA hypothesis on wood decomposition rates of these two temperate tree species, and (ii) to investigate if HFA hypothesis can be explained by diversity and community composition of bacteria and in detail N-fixing bacteria (as determined by molecular 16S rRNA and nifH gene amplification) and fungi (as determined by molecular ITS rRNA amplification and sporocarp surveys). Our results showed that wood decomposition rates were accelerated at “home” versus “away” by 38.19% ± 20.04% (mean ± SE). We detected strong changes in fungal richness (increase 36–50%) and community composition (RANOSIM = 0.52–0.60, P < 0.05) according to HFA hypothesis. The changes of fungi were much stronger than for total bacteria and nitrogen fixing for both at richness and community composition levels. In conclusion, our results support the HFA hypothesis in deadwood: decomposition rate is accelerated at home due to specialization of fungal communities produced by the plant community above them. Furthermore, the higher richness of fungal sporocarps and nitrogen-fixing bacteria (nifH) may stimulate or at least stabilize wood decomposition rates at “home” versus “away.”

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Acknowledgements

We thank the managers of the three Exploratories, Swen Renner, Sonja Gockel, and Andreas Hemp, and all former managers for their work in maintaining the plot and project infrastructure; Simone Pfeffer, Maren Gleisberg, and Christiane Fischer, and all members at BEO for giving support through the central office; Jens Nieschulze for managing the central data base; and Markus Fischer, Eduard Linsenmair, Dominik Hessenmöller, Daniel Prati, Ingo Schöning, François Buscot, Ernst-Detlef Schulze, Wolfgang W. Weisser, and the late Elisabeth Kalko for their role in setting up the Biodiversity Exploratories project.

Availability of Data and Material

The dataset analyzed during this study are included in this manuscript as Supplementary material files. The raw sequence data for the ITS and 16S pyrosequencing datasets are available from the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Traces/study/) under experiments SRX589508 and SRX589509, respectively. New nifH nucleotide sequences and their MOTU (molecular operational taxonomic unit) assignments are available under accession numbers HF559482-HF560561.

Funding

The work has been (partly) funded by the DFG Priority Program 1374 “Infrastructure-Biodiversity-Exploratories” (KR 3587/1-1, KR 3587/3-2, BU 941/17-1).

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Author notes

  1. Witoon Purahong and Björn Hoppe contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. UFZ-Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Department of Soil Ecology, Theodor-Lieser-Str. 4, 06120, Halle (Saale), Germany

    Witoon Purahong, Dirk Krüger, François Buscot & Björn Hoppe

  2. Faculty of Environment and Natural Resources, Chair of Silviculture, University of Freiburg, Tennenbacherstr. 4, 79085, Freiburg i. Brsg., Germany

    Tiemo Kahl

  3. UNESCO Biosphere Reserve Thuringian Forest, Brunnenstr. 1, 98711, Schmiedefeld am Rennsteig, Germany

    Tiemo Kahl

  4. German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Deutscher Platz 5e, 04103, Leipzig, Germany

    François Buscot

  5. Julius Kühn-Institute, Institute for National and International Plant Health, Messeweg 11/12, 38104, Braunschweig, Germany

    Björn Hoppe

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  1. Witoon Purahong
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Contributions

WP conceived the ideas. TK, DK, and BH collected the data. WP, BH, and FB designed methodology. WP and BH analyzed data; WP and BH led the writing of the manuscript with substantial contributions of all co-authors.

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Correspondence to Witoon Purahong or Björn Hoppe.

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Field work permits were issued by the responsible state environmental offices of Baden-Württemberg, Thüringen, and Brandenburg (according to § 72 BbgNatSchG).

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Purahong, W., Kahl, T., Krüger, D. et al. Home-Field Advantage in Wood Decomposition Is Mainly Mediated by Fungal Community Shifts at “Home” Versus “Away”. Microb Ecol 78, 725–736 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-019-01334-6

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