Misdiagnosis and uncritical use of plant mycorrhizal data are not the only elephants in the room

A response to Brundrett & Tedersoo (2019)‘Misdiagnosis of mycorrhizas and inappropriate recycling of data can lead to false conclusions’

There is increasing interest in using plant mycorrhizal traits–characteristics related to a plant’s ability to form mycorrhiza l symbiosis–to understand the role of mycorrhizas within and across communities, ecosystems and biogeographical regions (Moora,2014; Tedersoo, 2017). Recent studies incorporating plant mycorrhizal traits, mainly mycorrhizal type (e.g. ecto-mycorrhizal(ECM), ericoid-mycorrhizal (ERM), arbuscular-mycorrhizal(AM), and non-mycorrhizal (NM)) and mycorrhizal status (obligately mycorrhizal (OM) and facultatively mycorrhizal (FM);e.g. Correia et al., 2018; Gerzet al., 2018), have assigned trait values from published empirical data for plant species of interest. Dedicated efforts to build and improve databases of empirical plant mycorrhizal traits (e.g. Chaudhary et al., 2016; Bueno et al., 2017) are making these resources increasingly comprehensive, transparent and accessible.