Managing Ectomycorrhizal Symbioses for Forest Resilience and Restoration under Global Change

Forest resilience depends on belowground partnerships as much as on biodiversity and forest management. Ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi connect roots with soil, regulate access to water and nutrients, influence carbon and nutrient cycling, and support tree establishment and stress tolerance. Yet climate warming, drought, fire, pollution, land-use change, biological invasions, and intensive forestry affect ECM communities and disrupt their functions. Rapid advances in molecular ecology, functional trait research, experimental inoculation, community transplantation, and long-term monitoring now provide new opportunities to move beyond descriptions of ECM diversity toward assessing ECM functions and developing practical applications. However, these advances remain poorly integrated across biomes, forest types, spatial scales, and management contexts, particularly in regions and forest biomes underrepresented in ECM research, including tropical, subtropical, and Southern Hemisphere systems.This Research Topic aims to connect fundamental and applied research on ECM symbioses across natural, managed, planted, and restored forests, with particular attention to understudied and threatened biomes. We seek to clarify how host identity and genotype, soil conditions, climate, disturbance, and forest management shape ECM diversity, community structure, functional traits, interaction networks, and physiological functioning, and how these changes affect tree regeneration, nutrition, water relations, productivity, health, and ecosystem recovery. A central objective is to translate ecological and molecular knowledge into evidence-based approaches for biodiversity conservation, forest nursery production, ECM fungal inoculation, ecological restoration, adaptive silviculture, and climate adaptation. We particularly encourage studies that bridge biological, spatial, and temporal scales and combine complementary approaches, including ECM morphotyping, fungal isolation and culture, metabarcoding, metagenomics, ecophysiology, controlled experiments, field surveys, long-term monitoring, evidence synthesis, and ecosystem modeling. By bringing together studies from diverse forest biomes and regions, this collection will identify general mechanisms, context-dependent responses, and practical priorities for conserving and managing belowground biodiversity in the face of climate change and other environmental threats.We welcome Original Research, Review, Systematic Review, Methods, Data Report, Perspective, Hypothesis and Theory, and Policy and Practice Review articles addressing the following themes: (1) ECM biodiversity, biogeography, community assembly, seasonality, and long-term dynamics; (2) functional traits, genetics, genomics, physiology, and common mycorrhizal networks; (3) responses of ECM communities and functions to drought, warming, fire, pollution, land-use change, intensive forestry, pathogens, biological invasions, and interacting disturbances; (4) nutrient and water acquisition, soil carbon dynamics, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem modeling; (5) tree regeneration, forest nursery practices, ECM fungal inoculation, ecological restoration, assisted migration, adaptive silviculture, and forest management; and (6) the ecology, conservation, cultivation, and sustainable use of hypogeous ECM fungi, including truffles. Contributions from boreal, temperate, Mediterranean, subtropical, and tropical forests are encouraged, as are cross-biome syntheses, standardized datasets, and studies integrating belowground measurements with tree and ecosystem performance.We welcome Original Research, Review, Systematic Review, Methods, Data Report, Perspective, Hypothesis and Theory, and Policy and Practice Review articles addressing the following themes: (1) ECM biodiversity, biogeography, community assembly, seasonality, and long-term dynamics; (2) functional traits, genetics, genomics, physiology, and common mycorrhizal networks; (3) responses of ECM communities and functions to drought, warming, fire, pollution, land-use change, intensive forestry, pathogens, biological invasions, and interacting disturbances; (4) nutrient and water acquisition, soil carbon dynamics, biogeochemistry, and ecosystem modeling; (5) tree regeneration, forest nursery practices, ECM fungal inoculation, ecological restoration, assisted migration, adaptive silviculture, and forest management; and (6) the ecology, conservation, cultivation, and sustainable use of hypogeous ECM fungi, including truffles. Contributions from boreal, temperate, Mediterranean, subtropical, and tropical forests are encouraged, as are cross-biome syntheses, standardized datasets, and studies integrating belowground measurements with tree and ecosystem performance. Topic editors: Rodrigo F. Ramos, Tine Grebenc, Nataša Šibanc, Zaida Inês Antoniolli, Cherdchai Phosri Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/85124/managing-ectomycorrhizal-symbioses-for-forest-resilience-and-restoration-under-global-change