Employment of a novel protocol to study the influence of early colonizers on the fungal community of rock faces.

We provide a novel protocol to increase usable taxonomically informative sequence length, decrease the number of unclassified sequences, and improve taxonomic determination confidence. This new protocol was tested specifically on the mycobiome of rock face colonizers (including lichens, mosses, and rock ferns). The relevance of this study is to advance current NGS protocols, provide a novel framework to move taxonomic identification of fungi forward, and apply this research to an understudied ecosystem.