Microbial diversity across microhabitats in the Zofin nature reserve (Zofinsky Prales)

First project using this datasetWe examined the fungal community composition of various forest microhabitats by performing an extensive sampling in the Zofinsky prales National Nature Reserve, one of the oldest natural beech forests in Europe, in order to compare fungal community composition between and within each of those microhabitats. Seven terrestrial microhabitats were selected for this study: soil, twigs, branches, trees, litter, senescent leaves, and fine roots. Fungal diversity and community composition were assessed using a metabarcoding survey of the fungal internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2), for which we computed a variety of statistical analyses to confirm or reject two hypotheses:H1) Geographic (neutral processes) and environmental filtering (niche processes) will be significant drivers of fungal community composition. Within-habitat spatial heterogeneity and geographic distance will be significant, albeit weaker drivers of fungal community composition compared to abiotic factors such as C/N ratio and pH. The combination of those groups of processes will explain most of the variability in fungal community structure and diversity.H2) Considering that some forest microhabitats can stretch across a large surface area and have no clear boundaries within the sampling zone, some can be considered continuous (i.e. soil and litter), semi-continuous (i.e. roots) or patchy (i.e. woody debris and leaves). There will be a stronger overlap in fungal community composition as well as more similar alpha diversity metrics between samples from continuous microhabitats compared to patchy microhabitats. This would include a higher similarity between continuous microhabitats and any other microhabitat when compared with patchy microhabitats and patchy or semi-continuous microhabitats.