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Title: First report of the post-fire morel, Morchella exuberans, in eastern North America

Author
item MILLER, ANDREW - University Of Illinois
item RAUDABAUGH, DANIEL - University Of Illinois
item ITURRIAGA, TERESA - University Of Illinois
item MATHENY, BRANDON - University Of Tennessee
item PETERSON, RONALD - University Of Tennessee
item HUGHES, KAREN - University Of Tennessee
item GUBE, MATTHIAS - University Of Gottingen
item POWERS, ROB - University Of Michigan
item JAMES, TIMOTHY - University Of Michigan
item O Donnell, Kerry

Submitted to: Mycologia
Publication Type: Research Notes
Publication Acceptance Date: 11/20/2017
Publication Date: 1/25/2018
Citation: Miller, A.N., Raudabaugh, D.B., Iturriaga, T., Matheny, P.B., Peterson, R.H., Hughes, K.W., Gube, M., Powers, R.A., James, T.Y., O'Donnell, K. 2018. First report of the post-fire morel, Morchella exuberans in eastern North America. Mycologia. 109(5):710-714. https://doi.org/10.1080/00275514.2017.1408294.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/00275514.2017.1408294

Interpretive Summary:

Technical 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. However, the species reported in these two studies cannot be verified in the absence of voucher specimens and supporting molecular systematic data. Here, nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) rDNA 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 large-scale fire in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee as M. exuberans. Because this fire-adapted species has a transcontinental disjunct distribution, a 4-gene dataset was assembled that included partial sequences from three nuclear protein-coding genes (RPB1, RPB2 and TEF1) and ITS + D1/D2 domains of nuclear large subunit rDNA to compare the collections from Michigan and Tennessee with those from western North America, Europe and China.