Luciana Alves in Nature: Climatic controls of decomposition drive the global biogeography of forest-tree symbioses

Luciana Alves co-authored (through the GFBI consortium) a paper led by Brian Steidinger (Stanford) that hit Nature’s front cover. 

They present a global map of the symbiotic status of the world’s forests, drawn from a database (GFBI consortium) of more than 1.1 million forest inventory plots and featuring some 28,000 species of tree. 

They found sharp transitions between the dominant types of symbiosis; these transitions are largely driven by climatically controlled decomposition rates. Our model predictions using projected climates for 2070 suggest a 10 percent reduction in the biomass of tree species that associate with ectomycorrhizal fungi, a type of fungi found primarily in cooler regions.