A meta-analysis of global fungal distribution reveals climate-driven patterns

Abstract

The evolutionary and environmental factors that shape fungal biogeography are incompletely understood. Here, we assemble a large dataset consisting of previously generated mycobiome data linked to specific geographical locations across the world. We use this dataset to describe the distribution of fungal taxa and to look for correlations with different environmental factors such as climate, soil and vegetation variables. Our meta-study identifies climate as an important driver of different aspects of fungal biogeography, including the global distribution of common fungi as well as the composition and diversity of fungal communities. In our analysis, fungal diversity is concentrated at high latitudes, in contrast with the opposite pattern previously shown for plants and other organisms. Mycorrhizal fungi appear to have narrower climatic tolerances than pathogenic fungi. We speculate that climate change could affect ecosystem functioning because of the narrow climatic tolerances of key fungal taxa.

GlobalFungi: Global database of fungal records from high-throughput-sequencing metabarcoding studies

“…We explored papers that used high-throughput sequencing for the analysis of fungal communities that were published until the beginning of 2019; in total, we explored 843 papers. The following selection criteria were used for the inclusion of samples (and, consequently, studies) into the dataset: (1) samples came from terrestrial biomes of soil, dead or live plant material (e.g., soil, litter, rhizosphere soil, topsoil, lichen, deadwood, root and shoot) and were not subject to experimental treatment; (2) the precise geographic location of each sample was recorded (GPS coordinates); (3) the whole fungal community was subject to amplicon sequencing (studies using group-specific primers were excluded); (4) the internal transcribed spacer regions (ITS1, ITS2, or both) were subject to amplification; (5) sequencing data (either in fasta or fastq format) were publicly available or provided by the authors of the study upon request, and the sequences were unambiguously assigned to samples; (6) the samples could be assigned to biomes according to the Environment Ontology (http://www.ontobee.org/ontology/ENVO) 8 . In total, there were 209 publications contained samples that matched our criteria (Online-Only Table 1).…”

“…On the other hand, since the advent of the high-throughput-sequencing methods, large amounts of sequencing data exist for fungi from terrestrial environments with sufficient metadata that allow their evaluation 7 . Recently, the meta-analysis of 36 papers reporting global diversity of soil fungi collected >3000 samples and helped to indicate that climate is an important factor for the global distribution of soil fungi and identify the hotspots of fungal diversity outside the tropics 8 . This approach clearly demonstrated the utility of a meta-study approach to address fungal biogeography, ecology and diversity.…”

“…This approach clearly demonstrated the utility of a meta-study approach to address fungal biogeography, ecology and diversity. In addition, the compilation of these data demonstrated the fact that symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi that aid cultural and wild plants to access nutrients, are more likely to be affected by rapid changes of climate than other guilds of fungi, including plant pathogens 8 and helped to identify which fungi tend to follow alien plants invading new environments 9 .…”

Meta-analysis of 139 extant Tara ocean metagenomes to unveil the relationship between taxonomy and functionality in prokaryotes inhabiting aquatic ecosystems

“…Grid-based rather than locality-based analyses can be used to standardize the geographic scale of the analysis, which facilitates cross-region comparisons and limits false presences in the data 19 . The grid-based approach is broadly favored in biogeographic analyses for its suitability for large-scale comparisons 20 . In cells containing multiple samples, the sample with the highest number of eggNOG families was selected, resulting in a total number of 74 samples.…”

Plant pathogen infection risk tracks global crop yields under climate change

“…Thus, there appears to be no major change in hydrology that would alter our overall conclusions on latitudinal shifts in pathogen burden. In addition, global observations 21 and field-scale experiments 22 suggest that temperature is the most important determinant of fungal distributions and activity.…”