Soil transfers from intact to disturbed boreal forests neither alter ectomycorrhizal fungal communities nor improve pine seedling performance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Forest disturbances can alter mycorrhizal fungal communities with consequences for subsequent plant establishment and growth. One possible mitigation strategy to promote forest recovery following disturbances is inoculation with soil from late‐successional forests. However, whether these soil transfers change the composition of resident fungal communities and how seedling growth responds to such transfers is unknown. To test whether soil transfers can mitigate disturbance‐mediated impacts on ectomycorrhizal fungal (EMF) communities, we transferred soils containing fungal inoculum collected from conspecific late‐successional forests into stands disturbed by wildfire, mountain pine beetle outbreak, clear‐cut logging or salvage logging. Afterward, lodgepole pine seeds were sown to measure germination, establishment and growth of seedlings, and to characterize root‐associated and soil EMF communities by sequencing the ITS1 rDNA region. Despite evidence that soil inocula contained viable EMF communities, transfers did not impact the root‐associated or soil EMF community composition, or seed germination, seedling establishment and growth. Resident EMF community composition remained unchanged upon transfers of fungi from late‐stage successional forests, and disturbance type singularly explained the EMF community composition associated with roots and soils. Ectomycorrhizal fungal taxa typically associated with mature pine forests were particularly abundant on roots of seedlings growing in plots impacted by beetle outbreak, while ‘early‐stage’ EMF taxa were associated with seedlings growing in wildfire and logging disturbances. Synthesis and applications. Following disturbances, soil and root‐associated EMF exhibit high functional redundancy, as seedling performance did not vary with differences in EMF community composition across disturbance types. Our findings suggest that soil transfers are unlikely to be an effective strategy in these stands and may be better targeted to highly degraded forests. The presence and abundance of EMF in disturbed forests should be assessed before committing to soil transfers as part of restoration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".