Grass associated endophytes in a common garden experiment

Many factors drive the diversity and composition of fungal endophytes; the most common being hostidentity and abundance, abiotic conditions (e.g. rainfall and temperature) and dispersal limitation, but alarge amount of variation in endophyte abundance, diversity and composition remains unexplained,even after accounting for these drivers. Recently, the effects that chemical and structural leaf functionaltraits have on the abundance, diversity and composition of endophytes have started receiving attention.Within tropical grassy ecosystems, C4 grasses have been shown to fall on a continuum from highlypalatable to highly flammable grasses with opposing traits. Here we grew grass seeds from a wide rangeof C4 grass species were collected from sites exposed to varying levels of herbivory, fire, and climate,with the aim of determining how opposing flammability-palatability traits of C 4 grasses effected theabundance, diversity, and composition of foliar fungal endophytes, without the confounding effects ofdifferent inoculum sources and abiotic conditions, by growing grasses in a common garden experimentalset-up. We used generalised linear models to test for which traits drive the abundance and richness offungal endophytes, while we used generalised linear latent variable models to test which traits shapedendophyte composition. Fire grasses which had a higher investment in structural compounds had alower abundance and diversity of fungal endophytes compared to highly palatable grazing grasses whichhad higher crude protein percentage and moisture content. Opposing flammability-palatability traitsselected for different endophyte taxa which led to different endophyte compositions between firegrasses vs grazing grasses. Traits which determined a grasses propensity to be burnt (i.e. structuralcomponents) or eaten by mammalian herbivores (i.e. digestibility and crude protein) shaped endophyteabundance, richness, and composition.