Data from: Long-lasting modification of soil fungal diversity associated with the introduction of rabbits to a remote sub-Antarctic archipelago

• Main Authors: Pansu, Johan, Winkworth, Richard C., Hennion, Françoise, Gielly, Ludovic, Taberlet, Pierre, Choler, Philippe
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: Embryophyta; Soil communities; Antarctic; Kerguelen; Kerguelen Islands; Antarc*
• Online Access: https://zenodo.org/record/4959252; https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.t8534

During the late nineteenth century, Europeans introduced rabbits to many of the sub-Antarctic islands, environments that prior to this had been devoid of mammalian herbivores. The impacts of rabbits on indigenous ecosystems are well studied; notably, they cause dramatic changes in plant communities and promote soil erosion. However, the responses of fungal communities to such biotic disturbances remain unexplored. We used metabarcoding of soil extracellular DNA to assess the diversity of plant and fungal communities at sites on the sub-Antarctic Kerguelen Islands with contrasting histories of disturbance by rabbits. Our results suggest that on these islands, the simplification of plant communities and increased erosion resulting from the introduction of rabbits have driven compositional changes, including diversity reductions, in indigenous soil fungal communities. Moreover, there is no indication of recovery at sites from which rabbits were removed 20 years ago. These results imply that introduced herbivores have long-lasting and multifaceted effects on fungal biodiversity as well as highlight the low resiliency of sub-Antarctic ecosystems. Vegetation surveys dataThis file contains data from vegetation surveys performed in study sites in Kerguelen Islands.The first row represent the percentage of vascular plant cover in each plot. Other rows contain the number of contacts of each plant species per plot (maximum 200 contacts per plot).vegetation_survey_kerguelen.xlsxUnfiltered sequencing data for fungal metabarcode (table format)This table contains pre-filtered sequencing data (i.e. usable merged reads assigned to their original sample) for fungal metabarcode. Amplicons were amplified using the primers ITS5 : 5'-GGAAGTAAAAGTCGTAACAAGG-3' (White et al. 1990) and 5.8S_fungi : 5'- CAAGAGATCCGTTGTTGAAAGTT-3' primers (Epp et al. 2012). Sequences were produced by a 2 x 250 bp paired-end sequencing on Illumina MiSeq platform. First processing steps were performed using the OBITOOLS software ...