Abstract
The unmanaged Norway spruce montane forests in the Bohemian Forest National Park (Czech Republic) suffered from repeated large-scale bark beetle outbreaks in last decade. In this study, the diversity of culturable foliar endophyte microfungi in needles originating from eleven recently wind-fallen trees in this area was surveyed.
Our aims were to describe their diversity and to determine the relative host and organ specificities of isolated endophyte species to estimate the species pool and abundance of foliar endophytes before the forest degradation. Microfungi were isolated from surface-sterilized needles, and the outgrowing strains were identified based on morphological and molecular characteristics (analyses of ITS1, ITS2 and partial 28S rDNA).
Fungal communities in the needles were diverse, with ascomycetes (mostly anamorphs of Helotiales) dominating basidiomycetes. The most frequent species ( sp., , sp. and two species of ) did not correspond with those recorded in previous studies of spp.
For example, the widely distributed was rarely recorded in this study. This pattern may be caused by different methods of sterilization and cultivation or by physiological characteristics of the needles, or it may reflect the species distribution in the studied area.
Members of the Helotiales, along with sequences from GenBank, showed substantial overlap in host affinities, most prominently between and and also among species from distant plant lineages.