A sampling method to describe the Norway spruce ectomycorrhizal community at plant level

Abstract

To verify the possibility of developing a sampling method to accurately describe the Norway spruce ectomycorrhizal community at plant level, research was conducted in four comparable monospecific forests on healthy, mature and coeval Norway spruce trees. The results showed that the lowest number of tips per root core can characterize the community changes from site to site, with tree species, age and sampling design being constant. This highlights the importance of ectomycorrhizal species distribution, which is not an intrinsic character of ectomycorrhizal species, and probably changes with the environmental and fungal community features. The research demonstrated, in accordance with a theoretical ectomycorrhizal distribution, the effectiveness of an encoded geometrical sampling design consisting of the collection of 24 root samples from each of the four unrelated plants, along four perpendicular directions and at six fixed distances from the collar, and with the observation of 10 randomly selected ectomycorrhizal tips per sample.

Keywords:

• Ectomycorrhizal community
• Norway spruce
• root system
• sampling method
• soil core

Acknowledgements

The research was supported by the Centro di Ecologia Alpina (TN, Italy), “Fondo per i progetti di ricerca della Provincia Autonoma di Trento”, Dinamus (437/2002) and InHumusNat2000 Projects (1587/2004) to L. Scattolin. The authors are grateful to Dr. Andy Taylor for his extremely helpful comments and suggestions on the manuscript.