Project description. The boreal forest landscape in Fennoscandia has undergone dramatic changes during the last 150 years, as intensive forest management and short rotation times have led to the loss and fragmentation of natural forests which in turn resulted in biodiversity decline. Wood-decay fungi of boreal forests contribute extensively to a wide range of ecosystem processes, including decomposition of organic carbon, deposition of recalcitrant carbon, and transformations of nitrogen and phosphorus. In Fennoscandia, up to 42% of polypore fungi are classified as red-listed. Dead-wood rich forests have become few and isolated, which has predisposed dead-wood dependent fungi to both resource limitation and dispersal limitation. As opposed to previous beliefs, efficient dispersal in several wood-decay fungi occurs only within some tens or hundreds of meters from the spore-producing fruit body. Ecologically specialized fungi are both dispersal and resource limited, as suitable substrate type is scarce in space and time. In this Master research project the candidate will investigate the air microbiome of three forests with different management practices; old growth forest with the focal species present, old growth forest without focal species present and managed forest. The main aims are to study (i) the fungal biodiversity in the air and compare this across the 3 forest types, (ii) how the species diversity varies during the fruiting season, and (iii) the potential of three forest types for establishment of future generations of polypores.
Method. The candidate will analyse species diversity in aerial spore samples collected from the three different forest types. Spore sampling will be done weekly from August to November. The potential for spore production will be assessed with an inventory of fruitbodies in each sampling location. The spore samples will represent composite samples, where numerous spores from numerous species are present. The species diversity will be assessed using metabarcoding, i.e. the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) will be sequenced from all spores present in the samples and the precence and abundance of the species will be identified using bioinformatic analyses. The candidate will be trained in molecular-based techniques such as DNA extraction and preparation of amplicon libraries. The Illumina sequencing data will be analyzed using bioinformatics pipelines (Vsearch, Qiime), data visualisation software and statistical packages in R (MetacodeR, ggplot, Vegan).
Expectations. The master student must be highly motivated to undertake such a pluridisciplinary subject. She/He is expected to work independently after training in mycology, molecular techniques and bio-informatics and statistics. The student must be willing to learn new tools for handling and analyzing the data. The student will have a desk close to the rest of the group and is expected to be present and participate in daily discussions and weekly meetings in English. Being part of Kauserud?s Group and a larger research project FunGen (www.mn.uio.no/ibv/english/research/sections/evogene/projects/fungen), the student is expected to collaborate and socialize with other researchers. As most master theses, our goal is to publish the results from the MSc project in an international scientific journal.
Contact information. Sundy Maurice (sundy.maurice@ibv.uio.no) and J?rn Henrik S?nsteb?
(j.h.sonstebo@ibv.uio.no)