First Report of the Post-Fire Morel Morchella exuberans in Eastern North America
Miller AN, Raudabaugh DB, Iturriaga T, Matheny PB, Petersen RH, Hughes KW, Gube M, Powers RA, James TY, O’Donnell K. 2018. First Report of the Post-Fire Morel Morchella exuberans in Eastern North America. Mycologia
ABSTRACT: Reports of true morels (Morchella) fruiting on conifer burn sites are common in western North America where five different fire-adapted species of black morels (Elata Clade) have been documented based on multilocus phylogenetic analyses. Fruiting of post-fire morels in eastern North America, by comparison, are rare and limited to a report from Minnesota in 1977 and eastern Ontario in 1991. Here, nuc rDNA internal transcribed spacer (ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 = ITS) sequences were used to identify the post-fire morel that fruited in great abundance the year following the 2012 Duck Lake Fire in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and after the 2016 largescale fire in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee as M. exuberans. A preliminary phylogenetic analysis suggests that the collections from eastern North America may be more closely related to those from Europe than from western North America, Europe, and China.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Miller, Andrew; Raudabaugh, Daniel; Iturriaga, Teresa; Matheny, P; Petersen, Ronald; Hughes, Karen; Gube, Matthias; Powers, Rob; James, Timothy; O’Donnell, Kerry
- Units
- GRSM
- Keywords
- APHN, Appalachian Highlands Network, Ascomycota, biodiversity, biogeography, conservation, Fungi, Great Smoky Mountains National Park, GRSM, GRSM-01294, ITS rDNA, RPB1, RPB2, SER, Southeast Region, TEF1, true morel