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7:00 OMS Society Business: Announcements, Introductions, or Short Presentations

7:30 pm Presentation: Fungi, fish, and forests: Characterizing salmon carcass-associated fungal taxa and fungal communities adapted to a natural nitrogen gradient along salmon streams.

Salmon streams create unique natural nitrogen gradients with associated fungal communities that are likely adapted to varying levels of soil nitrogen, yet these communities have never been characterized. In addition, the unique fungal taxa associated with salmon carcasses have never been studied with modern molecular methods. Preliminary results show that fungal communities and their respective functional traits shift along a natural nitrogen gradient and in response to a large-scale salmon carcass fertilization experiment. Nitrophilic, hydrophilic, and short distance exploration type species functional groups decreased in abundance with decreasing nitrogen availability, and increased in response to the salmon carcass fertilization. The results from this study will significantly increase our understanding of how nitrogen structures fungal communities, and further contribute to the characterization of fungal communities uniquely associated with salmon carcasses and the potentially integral role these communities play in riparian ecosystems.

Speaker: Anne Polyakov, 2020 OMS Judy Roger Memorial Scholarship Winner. Anne is a PhD student within the Quantitative Ecology and Resource Management Program at the University of Washington, studying the role of mycorrhizal fungi in carbon and nutrient cycling within forest ecosystems using statistical, mechanistic, and simulation modeling.