Formation of sporocarps strongly depends on environmental conditions, such as temperature, rainfall and humidity (Alexopoulos

et al. 1996; Zak 2005). From the limited data on the possible relation between precipitation and the presence of species and the number of sporocarps formed it appears that an optimal amount of rainfall exists for the formation of sporocarps by the various species in the Colombian Amazon forests. Probably, the optimal amount of precipitation differs also between this website terra firme and flood forests, but more data are required to address this issue. Next to differences in plant composition and landscapes, the plots also differed in a number of abiotic factors, such as pH, organic matter, cation exchange capacity (CEC), nutrient and mineral contents, and flooding frequencies (Vester and Cleef 1998; C. Lopez-Q. unpubl. data). Habitat differentiation, together with different perturbation stages, such as flooding and forest succession, may result in different microclimates. The observed differences in shared species between flood and non-flood forests and the high production of sporocarps in the flooded plots AM-MFIS (804 sporocarps) and AM-FPF (741 sporocarps) at the Amacayacu

site may be related to the regular deposition of detritus, nutrients and Copanlisib ic50 organic matter during the floods that occur on average twice a year. Alluvial soils in várzea are rich in nutrient content (Singer 1988) and those in Amacayacu also have a higher pH of 4.5–4.9 if compared to terra firme forests that have a pH

range of 4.1–4.4 (Rudas and Prieto 1998). The main determinant causing the differences in fungal biodiversity between flood and non-flood forests remains to be identified. The extent of fungal diversity Thiamine-diphosphate kinase on a global scale is a heavily debated issue (Hawksworth 1991, 2001; Mueller et al. 2007; Schmit and Mueller 2007; Hyde 2001; Hyde et al. 2007; Crous et al. 2006). Extrapolations based on the total number of plant species and the assumption of a specific relationship between plant and fungal biodiversity have been used to get to estimates of 1.5 million or more existing species of fungi. In our case, the tree/fungal species ratio was 0.3 for Amacayacu and 0.7 for Aracuara, which is much higher than the results obtained by Schmit and Mueller (2007) who estimated the ratio between vascular plants and macrofungal species in Central and South America as 0.08. The difference between our results and those of Schmit and Mueller may be due to the fact that we included only trees with a dbh ≥2.5 cm, while they obtained the ratio using macrofungal species and all vascular plants from Central and South America. However, both ratios may underestimate the real figure of fungal biodiversity as many taxa are excluded, such as all or most microfungi, including yeasts, zygomycetes and filamentous Ascomycota.