Abstract
The Swedish forest landscape has experienced a loss of natural disturbance processes and current management recognizes that forest fires need to be reintroduced. However, it is unclear whether the ecological memory of the ecosystem is sufficient to allow species to locate and colonize restored habitats. The project will focus wood fungi confined to burned or fire-influenced dead pines. Their occurrence is temporary both on individual dead trees due to decay and at the stand scale as succession progress. It can thus be hypothesized that this group of fungi are “patch tracking metapopulations” at two spatial scales, and that the dispersal and establishment stages is key factors in their life history. The current project is to be viewed as a part pf a larger ongoing attempt to understand the dynamics of fungal species dependent of burned pine wood. It includes a set of studies that pinpoint crucial gaps in our current knowledge. It aims to feed missing links to metapopulation models and thus provide management with tools for efficient planning at landscape scale. It utilizes modern molecular tools to identify species from mycelia and to analyze the genetic variation among colonizing species. It includes four subprojects, i) Screening for potential colonizers during the initial stages after forest fire; ii) Fungal spore availability in different landscapes; iii) Relation between spore availability and colonization patterns; iv) Genetic variation among colonizers.
Sweden