FunDive: Multi substrate monitoring and macroecology of pine forest fungal communities from the Mediterranean Basin to the Arctic Circle

Fungi are a taxonomically highly diverse kingdom and have evolved a diversity of lifestyles that perform crucial roles in global ecosystems. However, compared to animals and plants, their biogeographic distribution and community ecology are less understood. A historic lack of research efforts leaves knowledge gaps in macroecology and biogeographic regions such as the Mediterranean and Alpine as well as in host relationships. As a result, fungi remain neglected in the field of conservation biology.

In an effort to shed light on fungal diversity across Europe, 120 researchers from 24 European countries have joined the FunDive project funded by Biodiversa+, the European Biodiversity Partnership. The core objective of the project is to improve the knowledge basis for including fungi in transnationional monitoring and conservation of biodiversity, by engaging citizen scientists, improving tools for fungal identification and analyzing large-scale patterns of fungal diversity, consolidating existing datasets combined with novel sampling. An integral component is the European-wide, multi-substrate sampling of >2000 environmental DNA (eDNA) units across 200 pine forests. Besides soil samples, we also take drill shavings from lying dead wood, and, on a subset of plots, we take sequential air samples capturing spores, and sample sporocarps from soil and wood. These different approaches are expected to yield valuable complementary information but have not yet been combined on such a large scale so far.  We focused on forests dominated by either the Euro-Siberian Pinus sylvestris, the Mediterranean P. nigra, or the alpine P. cembra. Using short-read sequencing, we investigate ecological patterns. As an additional effort, we also sequence long-read DNA regions on a subset of samples to compare sequencing methodologies and improve taxonomy. A core research objective will be to better understand the drivers of fungal diversity across Europe, combining regional climatic conditions with local stand-scale characteristics. We will provide an overview of the first results, with an emphasis on comparing fungal diversity assessment methods.