Idiosyncratic responses to biotic and environmental filters in wood‐inhabiting fungal communities

Quantification of different processes affecting the assembly of ecological communities remains challenging, especially in species-rich communities. While the role of environmental filtering has generally been well established, fewer studies have experimentally shown how other ecological assembly processes, such as biotic filtering, structure species-rich communities. Here, we studied the relative roles of biotic and environmental filtering in the colonization of wood-inhabiting fungi, a species-rich, highly interactive, and environment-sensitive group of species. We conducted a field experiment where we simulated colonization with inoculations of nine fungal species in habitat patches (i.e., logs) with varying biotic and abiotic conditions. We characterized the local resident communities before the inoculations and the colonization success of the inoculated species after one and two years using DNA metabarcoding. We asked what determined the colonization success of the inoculated species by comparing the predictive performance of alternative models. These models included either only abiotic environmental predictors (i.e., physical log properties) or additionally different aspects of the resident fungal communities (i.e., resident fungal species richness, community composition, and DNA amount) as biotic predictors. While all nine species successfully colonized the logs, the rate of success and the factors explaining their colonization success varied among species. The colonization success of four of the inoculated species was explained mostly by the abiotic environmental variables, while the colonization success of three species was additionally explained by the resident communities. The influential biotic predictors varied from the presence of individual species to the collective presence of multiple species. Finally, for two of the inoculated species, all the models showed poor predictive performance. Our results indicate how environmental and biotic filtering may jointly structure species-rich communities. Overall, the results show that species vary idiosyncratically in their response to biotic and environmental factors, highlighting the need to consider the complexity of species-level responses when predicting community-level changes.