Wang et al. (2025): The six-year decomposition of coarse woody debris drives shifts in soil fungal communities in subtropical forests
Nan Wang, Binle Ding, Hui Chen, Tingsi Xie, Shangbin Bai, Hua Chen, Xiaocheng Pan, IN: Frontiers in Microbiology, https://doi.org/10.3389/fmicb.2025.1544163
Coarse woody debris (CWD) plays a vital role in forest ecosystems, serving as a reservoir for carbon sequestration. While global climate change is expected to exacerbate forest disturbances and lead to a significant accumulation of CWD, the effect of CWD decomposition on the composition, diversity and functional traits of soil fungal communities remains unclear, especially for subtropical forests with high tree species diversity. Here, the authors conducted a six-year in situ field experiment (2018–2024) in a subtropical evergreen broad-leaved forest in southern China. They used high-throughput sequencing and qPCR to examine how decomposition of three dominant tree species (conifer, broadleaved, and woody monocot moso bamboo) influences soil fungal composition, and applied the FUNGuild tool to infer fungal trophic modes and functional groups from sequencing data.