Compositional and functional shifts in arctic fungal communities in response to experimentally increased snow depth

Climate warming leads to more intensive evaporation from the Arctic sea resulting in increased precipitation in the low Arctic, e.g., higher snowfall during winter. Deeper snow keeps the arctic soils warmer and alters soil attributes and vegetation, e.g., increase in nitrogen availability, expansion of shrubs and decline in shade-intolerant lichens and bryophytes. Changes in soil properties and vegetation are expected to influence on saprotrophic and plant-symbiotic fungi, but how increased snow depth affects their community composition remain unknown. In the present work, we used DNA metabarcoding to study the effects of long-term experimental manipulations of snow depth on soil fungal communities in dry heath and moist tussock tundra in Arctic Alaska. We report strong changes in fungal community compositions in the two tundra types, with pronounced declines observed in the majority of fungal functional guilds, including ectomycorrhizal, lichenized, plant pathogenic, saprotrophic and b...