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Our next speaker is Teresa Gimeno of the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications (CREAF).
Teresa will talk about the Changes in the composition of ectomycorrhizal fungal communities and the water uptake of European beech forest across a natural precipitation gradient.
In this talk, Teresa will present the results of a project where she sought to assess whether the community composition of mycorrhizal fungi is related to water uptake patterns. Ecologists and biologists learn that plants and fungi establish symbiotic associations in which the fungal partner receives carbohydrates from photosynthesis exported via roots, whereas the plant benefits from protection against pathogens and increased nutrient uptake, but also water. For the plant, the former two have been demonstrated widely, whereas the role of mycorrhizal associations during water uptake is still under debate. Here, she combined molecular techniques and analyses of water isotopic composition to asses whether diversity and community composition of the fungal community was related to patterns of soil water uptake.