While the succession of terrestrial plant communities is well studied, less is known about succession on dead wood, especially how it is affected by environmental factors. While temperate forests face increasing canopy mortality, which causes considerable changes in microclimates, it remains unclear how canopy openness affects fungal succession. Here, we used a large real-world experiment to study the effect of closed and opened canopy on treatment-based alpha and beta fungal fruiting diversity. We found increasing diversity in early and decreasing diversity at later stages of succession under both canopies, with a stronger decrease under open canopies. However, the slopes of the diversity versus time relationships did not differ significantly between canopy treatments. The community dissimilarity remained mainly stable between canopies at ca. 25% of species exclusively associated with either canopy treatment. Species exclusive in either canopy treatment showed very low number of occupied objects compared to species occurring in both treatments. Our study showed that canopy loss subtly affected fungal fruiting succession on dead wood, suggesting that most species in the local species pool are specialized or can tolerate variable conditions. Our study indicates that the fruiting of the fungal community on dead wood is resilient against the predicted increase in canopy loss in temperate forests.

Bavarian Forest National Park Grafenau Germany

Faculty of Biological Sciences Institute for Ecology Evolution and Diversity Conservation Biology Goethe University Frankfurt 60438 Frankfurt am Main Germany

Faculty of Biology Department of Ecology Animal Ecology Philips University of Marburg 35032 Marburg Germany

Field Station Fabrikschleichach Department of Animal Ecology and Tropical Biology Biocenter University of Würzburg 96181 Rauhenebrach Germany

Fungal Ecology and BayCEER University of Bayreuth Universitätsstr 30 95440 Bayreuth Germany

Global Change Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences 603 00 Brno Czech Republic

International Institute Zittau Department of Bio and Environmental Sciences Technical University Dresden 02763 Zittau Germany

Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences 14200 Prague Czech Republic

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