Forest Fires and Fungi: Losers, Winners and Strategies

Fire is a natural part of most western forest ecosystems, and while plant strategies for surviving or recolonizing after fire are well known, much less is known about how fungi deal with this common disturbance. This talk will review some of the details that are known about how saprobic and ectomycorrhizal fungi recolonized following severe, stand-replacing fires, and the examples will be drawn primarily from studies of the Mt. Vision Fire in Pt. Reyes National Seashore and the more recent Rim Fire in Stanislaus National Forest and Yosemite National Park. These examples will also trace the development of molecular ecology from the crude RFLP days to the current high-throughput sequence.

Speaker: Tom Bruns, UC Berkeley