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Fungal endophytes in dicotyledonous neotropical trees: patterns of abundance and diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2002

A. Elizabeth ARNOLD ,
Zuleyka MAYNARD  and
Gregory S. GILBERT
A. Elizabeth ARNOLD
Affiliation:
Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA. E-mail: betsya@u.arizona.edu
Zuleyka MAYNARD
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Barro Colorado Island, Apartado 2072, Balboa, República de Panamá.
Gregory S. GILBERT
Affiliation:
Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA.
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Abstract

Fungal endophytes have been found in every plant species examined to date and appear to be important, but largely unquantified, components of fungal biodiversity. Endophytes are especially little known in tropical forest trees, where their abundance and diversity are thought to be greatest. Here, we explore the occurrence of endophytes in a broad diversity of woody, angiospermous taxa in a lowland, moist tropical forest in central Panamá. We use similarity indices to assess host preference and spatial heterogeneity of endophytes associated with two co-occurring, but distantly related, understorey tree species in two sites of that forest, and assess the utility of indices based on frequencies of morphospecies occurrence (Morisita-Horn index) and on presence-absence data (Sørensen’s index). We suggest that our understanding of fungal diversity will be enhanced by exploring ecological patterns underlying endophyte occurrence in host species, and discuss methods for assessing the proportion of fungal biodiversity represented by tropical endophytes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Mycological Research , Volume 105 , Issue 12 , December 2001 , pp. 1502 - 1507
Copyright
© The British Mycological Society 2001

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Footnotes

Paper presented at the Asian Mycological Congress 2000 (AMC 2000), incorporating the 2nd Asia–Pacific Mycological Congress on Biodiversity and Biotechnology, and held at the University of Hong Kong on 9–13 July 2000.