Arthropod communities in fungal fruitbodies are weakly structured by climate and biogeography across European beech forests

The Tinder Fungus Fomes Fomentarius hosts a large number of arthropods in European beech forests. The low biogeographical and climatic structure of the communities suggests that fruitbodies represent a habitat that offers similar conditions across large gradients of climate and space, but are characterised by high local variability in community composition and colonised by species with high dispersal ability. For European beech forests, retention of trees with F. fomentarius and promoting its recolonisation where it had declined seems a promising conservation strategy. The total number of arthropod species occurring in fruitbodies of F. fomentarius across European beech forests was estimated to be 600. Alpha diversity increased with increasing fruitbody biomass; it decreased with increasing longitude, temperature and latitude. Beta diversity was mostly composed by turnover. Patterns of beta diversity were only weakly linked to space and the overall explanatory power was low. We could distinguish two genotypes of F. fomentarius, which showed no spatial structuring.