Mushrooms play a provisioning ecosystem service as wild food. The abundance of this resource shows high
annual and interannual variability, particularly in Mediterranean ecosystems. Climate conditions have been
considered the main factor promoting mushroom production variability, but several evidences suggest that forest
composition, age and growth play also a role.
Long-term mushroom production datasets are critical to understand the factors behind mushroom productivity.
We used 22 and 24 year-long time series of mushroom production in Pinus pinaster and Pinus sylvestris
forests in Central Spain to evaluate the effect of climate and forest productivity on mushroom yield. We combined
climatic data (precipitation and temperature) and remote sensing data (soil moisture and the Normalized
Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI, a surrogate of primary productivity) to model mushroom yields for each
forest and for the main edible species of economic interest (Boletus edulis and Lactarius deliciosus).
We hypothesized that mushroom yield would be related to (i) forest primary productivity inferred from NDVI
affects mushroom yields, that (ii) soil moisture inferred from remote sensors will equal the predictive power
precipitation data, and that (iii) combining climatic and remote sensing will improve mushroom yield models.
We found that (i) previous year NDVI correlated (r =0.41–0.6) with mushroom yields; (ii) soil moisture from
remote sensors rivaled the predictive power of precipitation (r = 0.63–0.72); and (iii) primary production and
climate variances were independent, thus the combination of climatic and remote sensing data improved models
with mean R2
adj as high as 0.629.
On the light of these results, we propose as a working hypothesis that mushroom production might be
modelled as a two step process. Previous year primary productivity would favour resource accumulation at tree
level, potentially increasing resources for mycelia growth, climatic conditions during the fruiting season control
the ability of mycelia to transform available resources into fruiting bodies
