DOI: 10.5061/dryad.0jb021d
title: Data from: The significance of retention trees for survival of ectomycorrhizal fungi in clear‐cut Scots pine forests

description: 1. Forestry with short stand generations and simplified forest structures
 has markedly af-fected forest biodiversity. One group of organisms
 adversely affected by clear-cutting is ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi, as
 they are associated with the roots of living trees. Retention forestry is
 a way of reducing logging impacts and enhancing biodiversity conservation.
 In-creasing the proportion of trees retained at harvest may improve ECM
 fungal diversity. 2. We investigated the potential for life-boating of ECM
 fungi through the harvesting phase in an experimental field study in a 190
 years old Scots pine forest in northern Sweden. The experiment comprised
 four levels of tree retention – unlogged forest, plots with 60% or 30% of
 evenly distributed trees retained, and clear-cuts without retained trees.
 We sampled soils and determined identities, frequencies and relative
 abundances of ECM fungal species dur-ing three years following logging
 through the use of high-throughput sequencing of ampli-fied ITS2 markers.
 3. We identified 151 ECM fungal species, with the five most abundant
 species accounting for 50% of the total ECM fungal amplicons. Three years
 after harvesting, the proportion of ECM sequences in the total amplicon
 pool had decreased proportionally to the extent of tree removal. In
 clear-cuts ECM fungal relative abundance had decreased by 95%, while ECM
 fungal species richness had declined by 75%, compared to unlogged plots.
 4. Tree retention enabled maintenance of the most frequent ECM species,
 while more lowly abundant species were progressively lost at random with
 increasing level of tree removal. Five of the most frequent ECM fungal
 species remained present after clear-cutting, probably associated with
 pine seedlings. 5. Synthesis and applications. Tree retention can moderate
 short-term and potentially also long-term logging impacts on
 ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi. Local ECM fungal diversity is preserved in
 proportion to the amount of retained trees. Abundant species may be
 largely maintained, even by low levels of tree retention and on naturally
 established seedlings. However, conservation of more infrequent species
 requires higher levels of tree retention, and our results suggest that
 around 75% of the ECM species are lost with the forest certifi-cation
 standard of 5% retention trees left at logging. 4-Feb-2019
description: Appendix Table
 1-6Six appenix tables;Table
 1. Number of naturally established Scots pine seedlings; Table 2.
 Taxonomic affiliations, species name, reference sequecences and no of
 times detected in the plots; Table 3. Significant parameters in a linear
 mixed model of the relative abundance of ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi;
 Table 4. Significant parameters in the linear mixed model of ECM fungal
 species richness; Table 5. No of reads (amplicons) of ECM fungal species
 pooled samples 2009-2013; Table 6. Number of Species Hypothesis and
 percentage of the total number of ECM fungal reads, for the most species
 rich genera and the order Thelephorales.