Fig. 4

Distribution of gymnosperm association among wood-decay fungi and five major brown rot lineages within Agaricomycetes. a) Number of angiosperm host tree species for white and brown rot species. b) Number of gymnosperm host tree species for white and brown rot species. Note the log scale of the y-axis and that the values were back-transformed. Significances were inferred using phylogenetic regression (Additional file 1: Table S5). c) Bimodal distribution of gymnosperm association of wood-decay fungi. The six-state character coding was based on the gymnosperm association. A gymnosperm association above 90% was classified as gymnosperm specialist, below 10% as angiosperm specialist and others as generalists (“90–10 specialization”, for details see Trait data and character matrix). d) Scaled number of host tree species grouped by the 90–10 specialization coding. e) Number of species for the five observed brown rot clades (Fig. 2). f) Number of species for white rot fungi and scaled number of host tree species grouped by the 90–10 specialization coding. Note that Amylocorticiales, Gomphales and Sebacinales had less than five host data points. Angiosperm tree image by Michele M. Tobias (see Acknowledgements)