New paper in Ecosphere by Austen Apigo!

I can't begin to describe how much work went into this paper by Austen Apigo that is finally out! The field and lab work were both done so meticulously, including the development of a novel standardization tool with its own R package, and the story coming out is also pretty cool. In "Plant abundance, but not plant evolutionary history, shapes patterns of host specificity in foliar fungal endophytes", we explored whether patterns of host specificity in foliar fungal endophytes were related to characteristics of the plant community. We comprehensively sampled all plant host species within a single community and tested the relationship between plant abundance or plant evolutionary relatedness and metrics of endophyte host specificity. We standardized the effect sizes of univariate host specificity metrics to randomized distributions to avoid spurious correlations between host specificity metrics and endophyte abundance (measured with amplicon sequencing). We found that more abundant plant species harbored endophytes that occupied fewer plant species and were consistently found in the same plant species across the landscape. But there was no relationship between plant phylogenetic distance and endophyte community dissimilarity. We still found that endophyte community composition significantly varied among plant species, families, and major groups, supporting a plant identity effect. We found that plant species abundance cay help explain why horizontally-transmitted endophytes vary geographically within host species ranges. The figure 5 also shows that plants that are evergreen and 'last longer' also harbored endophytes that occupied fewer plant species (i.e., have higher host specificity).