The role of sampling methodology and site selection on myxomycete data from the Neotropics

Myxomycete sporocarps are practical units that can be used to study the effect of environmental issues such as climate change,urbanization,and natural disasters on microorganisms.Recent scientific literature lacks empirical approaches to understand the impacts of sampling design and site selection on the data obtained in myxomycete field surveys.The present investigation was designed to generate useful data for the evaluation of methodological approaches.Myxomycetes were studied for two years in a tropical premontane wet forest in Costa Rica using two different sampling strategies and several collecting sites to evaluate potential differences in the results.Field collections were used to generate the dataset due to their usefulness for monitoring purposes.Sampling strategies had a smaller impact on the reported structure and composition of obtained species assemblages than site selection,but a combination of both clearly maximized the effort and provided the best results during the field surveys.Functional variables of the forest with direct influence on the myxomycete life cycle such as tree diameter and leaf litter depth impacted the results synergically.Simulations of surveys at two different levels of effort were compared with total yearly efforts and results showed that revisiting sampling sites maximized the field effort.Results demonstrated that the variability of sporocarp production in tropical forests should be considered in the design of long-term field experiments on myxomycetes.

Generation of myxomycete data from three discrete experiments using moist chamber cultures in a Neotropical forest

The moist chamber technique is widely used in ecological research on myxomycetes.However,limited assessments on the usefulness of the technique have been carried out using empirical data.In the present study,three discrete experiments were carried out in a tropical forest in Costa Rica with the main objective of providing meaningful parameters for the design of future studies in similar environments.All three experiments showed that results could be maximized for representativeness by designing studies that purposedly target ecological components of the studied system.In a comparison of recorded data at three heights above the forest ground,a significantly higher number of records and species were observed in the higher vertical partitions,suggesting that collecting research material from the ground,in this ecological setting,reduces the probability of recording the highest species diversity.However,the ground level was associated with a high number of records and species within the genus Didymium,offering relevant information for studies targeting this genus.Similarly,based on effort,results from the present study suggest that a collecting effort designed to record system variability represents a superior cost-benefit situation for synecological studies than a more intense effort designed only for a limited spatial or temporal space,which in turn would reduce the ecological significance of the resultant data.