composition of wood-inhabiting fungi within residual stumps

In this study, we compared the impact of tree-length harvesting to more intensive full-tree harvesting on the composition of fungi residing in residual stumps 5 years after harvest. In the tree-length treatment, a larger amount of residual material was left around the residual stumps in contrast to the full-tree treatment where a large amount of woody debris was removed. We collected sawdust from randomly selected residual stumps in each of the tree-length and full-tree treatments. A total of 50 samples (25 in each treatment) were collected. We characterized the fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) present in each stump using high-throughput DNA sequencing of the fungal ITS region. We observed no differences in Shannon diversity and in the composition of fungal communities between tree-length and full-tree harvesting. Using the differential abundance analysis implemented with DESeq2, we did, however, detect several associations between specific fungal taxa and the intensity of residual biomass harvest.