Aim There is compelling evidence that drivers and patterns of biodiversity and ecosystem functioning vary across multiple spatial scales, from global to regional, landscape and patch. However, macroecological processes impacting freshwater biodiversity are poorly understood compared to marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Despite step changes in data availability, we have a fragmented view beyond the local scale of how hydrologi...

Despite host‐fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life‐history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free‐living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orde...

Summary Plant‐associated microbial communities can profoundly affect plant health and success, and research is still uncovering factors driving the assembly of these communities. Here, we examine how geography versus host species affects microbial community structure and differential abundances of individual taxa. We use metabarcoding to characterize the bacteria and eukaryotes associated with five, often co‐occurring species...

Saprotrophic fungi are the primary decomposers of plant litter in temperate forests, and their activity is critical for carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling. Simulated atmospheric N deposition is associated with reduced fungal biomass, shifts in fungal community structure, slowed litter decay, and soil C accumulation. Although rarely studied, N deposition may also result in novel selective pressures on fungi, affecting evolutio...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 394–407 Abstract Mycorrhizal fungi influence plant growth, local biodiversity and ecosystem function. Effects of the symbiosis on plants span the continuum from mutualism to parasitism. We sought to understand this variation in symbiotic function using meta‐analysis with information theory‐based model selection to assess the relative importance of factors in five categories: (1) identity of the host...

The deadly poisonous Amanita phalloides is common along the west coast of North America. Death cap mushrooms are especially abundant in habitats around the San Francisco Bay, California, but the species grows as far south as Los Angeles County and north to Vancouver Island, Canada. At different times, various authors have considered the species as either native or introduced, and the question of whether A. phalloides is an inv...

Summary The community of organisms inhabiting the water‐filled leaves of the carnivorous pitcher‐plant Sarracenia purpurea includes arthropods, protozoa and bacteria, and serves as a model system for studies of food web dynamics. Despite the wealth of data collected by ecologists and zoologists on this food web, very little is known about the bacterial assemblage in this microecosystem. We used terminal restriction fragment le...

Advances in ecology during the past decade have led to a much more detailed understanding of the potential negative consequences of species’ introductions. Moreover, recent studies of mycorrhizal symbionts have led to an increased knowledge of the potential utility of fungal inoculations in agricultural, horticultural and ecological management. The intentional movement of mycorrhizal fungal species is growing, but the concomit...