Analysis of co-occurrence in a fungal community

An approach is presented for quantifying associations between species pairs over a scale of 0·5–1 mm by plating several 0·5–1 mm particles of washed organic matter on agar plates, and observing whether or not fungal species which emerge from the particles are distributed in a random manner with regard to each other. Most of the associations between the seven most abundant species in particles of organic matter from an agricultural soil were significantly negative. Co-occurrence of these species was weakly, but significantly, related to their correlation patterns across samples collected over a spatial scale of several metres.