Accounting for environmental variation in co‐occurrence modelling reveals the importance of positive interactions in root‐associated fungal communities ...

• Main Authors: Abrego, Nerea, Roslin, Tomas, Huotari, Tea, Tack, Ayco J.M., Lindahl, Björn D., Tikhonov, Gleb, Somervuo, Panu, Schmidt, Niels Martin, Ovaskainen, Otso, Tack, Ayco J. M.
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2020
• Subjects: co-occurrence; interaction network; Mycorrhiza; Symbiotic network; Arctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9kd51c5dp; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.9kd51c5dp

Understanding the role of interspecific interactions in shaping ecological communities is one of the central goals in community ecology. In fungal communities, measuring interspecific interactions directly is challenging because these communities are composed of large numbers of species, many of which are unculturable. An indirect way of assessing the role of interspecific interactions in determining community structure is to identify the species co-occurrences that are not constrained by the environmental conditions. In this study, we investigated co-occurrences among root-associated fungi, asking whether fungi co-occur more or less strongly than expected based on the environmental conditions and the host plant species examined. For this purpose, we generated molecular data on root-associated fungi of five plant species evenly sampled along an elevational gradient at a high Arctic site. We analysed the data using a joint species distribution modelling approach that allowed us to identify those ... : These data consist of molecularly identified root-associated fungal communities of five plant species occurring along an arctic elevational gradient. The original sequence data based on the ITS region are published in Abarenkov et al (2019 https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.9dr6j0c), and the data published here consist of the postprocessed and taxonomically assigned using the Protax-fungi approach. The data further contains information about the functional group of each taxonomical unit (mycorrhizal, endophytic or unclassified), and data on the environmental covariates used in the analyses. The data are accompained by the R-scripts for carrying out the analyses presented in Abrego et al (2020, Molecular Ecology) about raw vs. environmentally constrained co-occurrences using the R-package Hmsc-R. ...