The significance of retention trees for survival of ectomycorrhizal fungi in clear‐cut Scots pine forests

1. Forestry with short stand generations and simplified forest structures has markedly af-fected forest biodiversity. One group of organisms adversely affected by clear-cutting is ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi, as they are associated with the roots of living trees. Retention forestry is a way of reducing logging impacts and enhancing biodiversity conservation. In-creasing the proportion of trees retained at harvest may improve ECM fungal diversity.

2. We investigated the potential for life-boating of ECM fungi through the harvesting phase in an experimental field study in a 190 years old Scots pine forest in northern Sweden. The experiment comprised four levels of tree retention – unlogged forest, plots with 60% or 30% of evenly distributed trees retained, and clear-cuts without retained trees. We sampled soils and determined identities, frequencies and relative abundances of ECM fungal species dur-ing three years following logging through the use of high-throughput sequencing of ampli...