Warming climate shapes the mutualistic interaction between truffle-like ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and mycophagous mammals

<p dir="ltr">The mutualistic interaction between truffle-like ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and mycophagous mammals is fundamental to forest health, supporting fungal dispersal, soil structure, nutrient cycling, and plant community dynamics worldwide. However, this mutualism remains poorly understood in the context of climate change, where shifts in sporocarp production may alter fungal spore dispersal, the diets of their mammalian dispersers, and forest ecosystem functioning. As one of the most specialised mycophagous mammals in the world, the endangered marsupial long-footed potoroo (<i>Potorous longipes</i>, LFP) provides a powerful model to investigate these dynamics. Using ITS2 metabarcoding of a unique and extensive 23-year collection of LFP scat samples, we examined how their truffle-like ECM fungal diet is shaped by intra- and inter-annual climate variation. Our findings revealed that the LFP’s fungal diet is shaped by temperature, precipitation, and aridity, with dietary richness negatively correlated with warmer temperatures. These results highlight the vulnerability of this mutualism to climate change, with serious implications for mammal persistence, fungal diversity, and ecosystem resilience globally.</p><p dir="ltr">This repository contains:</p><ul><li><b>fastq_files_comparessed.tar.gz</b>: raw demulitplexed fastq files produced by Illumina NextSeq 2000 (San Diego, CA, USA) sequencing of LFP scat specimens, conducted by the Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF) in Melbourne, Australia; and</li><li><b>Mapping_file.txt</b>: sample mapping file to process sequence data using the LotuS v2.23 pipeline (Özkurt et al., 2022).</li></ul><p dir="ltr">Code to perform subsequent bioinformatics and statistical analysis is available at https://github.com/emmcin/ClimateMycophagy</p>