PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Chunyan Yang
AU  - Douglas A. Schaefer
AU  - Weijie Liu
AU  - Viorel D. Popescu
AU  - Chenxue Yang
AU  - Xiaoyang Wang
AU  - Chunying Wu
AU  - Douglas W. Yu
TI  - Higher fungal diversity is correlated with lower CO<sub>2</sub> emissions from dead wood in a natural forest: BioRxiv preprint
AID  - 10.1101/051235
DP  - 2016 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 051235
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/13/051235.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/13/051235.full
AB  - Wood decomposition releases almost as much CO2 to the atmosphere as does fossil-fuel combustion, so the factors regulating wood decomposition can affect global carbon cycling. We used metabarcoding to estimate the fungal species diversities of naturally colonized decomposing wood in subtropical China and, for the first time, compared them to concurrent measures of CO2 emissions. Wood hosting more diverse fungal communities emitted less CO2, with Shannon diversity explaining 26 to 44% of emissions variation. Community analysis supports a ‘pure diversity’ effect of fungi on decomposition rates and thus suggests that interference competition is an underlying mechanism. Our findings extend the results of published experiments using low-diversity, laboratory-inoculated wood to a high-diversity, natural system. We hypothesize that high levels of saprotrophic fungal biodiversity could be providing globally important ecosystem services by maintaining dead-wood habitats and by slowing the atmospheric contribution of CO2 from the world’s stock of decomposing wood. However, large-scale surveys and controlled experimental tests in natural settings will be needed to test this hypothesis.