Current environmental change predictions forecast intensified drought conditions. It is becoming increasingly evident that plant communities are sensitive to drought and that soil-inhabiting microbial communities vary along precipitation gradients. However, the drought sensitivity of microbial communities in general and that of soil fungi in particular remains unclear, even though understanding their responses to adverse environmental conditions is vital for better understanding of ecosystem service provisioning. We sampled soils at two sites with established experiments that imposed extreme, chronic drought to assess fungal community responses. We analyzed fungal communities using both culture-dependent and -independent tools and MiSeq-sequenced communities from colony forming units (CFU-PCR) on a drought simulating medium and from environmental DNA (ePCR), to compare the conclusions derived from these two methods. Our data from the two approaches consistently indicate that the composition of fungal communities is not affected by the drought treatment, whereas – based on the CFU-PCR but not ePCR data – their richness and diversity increased under drought conditions at the more mesic of the two sites. Further, based on the direct comparisons of CFU-PCR and ePCR, we estimate that more than 10% of the fungal community and more than 20% of the ascomycetes were culturable. We conclude that although recent research indicates that plant and bacterial communities respond to drought, fungal community responses are more variable, particularly in experiments that impose chronic drought under field conditions.

当前的环境变化预测预测干旱情况将加剧。越来越明显的是，植物群落对干旱敏感，并且土壤微生物群落随降水梯度变化。但是，尽管了解微生物群落对不利环境条件的反应对于更好地了解生态系统服务的提供至关重要，但总体上微生物群落尤其是土壤真菌对干旱的敏感性仍不清楚。我们通过建立的实验对两个地点的土壤进行了采样，这些实验施加了极端的，长期的干旱来评估真菌群落的反应。我们使用了依赖于文化的工具和不依赖于文化的工具对真菌群落进行了分析，并使用了干旱模拟培养基上的菌落形成单位（CFU-PCR）和环境DNA（ePCR）进行了MiSeq测序的群落，比较了从这两种方法得出的结论。我们从这两种方法得到的数据始终表明，真菌群落的组成不受干旱处理的影响，而基于CFU-PCR而非ePCR数据，在干旱条件下，它们的丰富性和多样性在两种情况下更为相似网站。此外，基于CFU-PCR和ePCR的直接比较，我们估计可以培养10％以上的真菌群落和20％以上的子囊菌。我们得出结论，尽管最近的研究表明植物和细菌群落对干旱有反应，