Fungi are key players in vital ecosystem services, spanning carbon cycling, decomposition, symbiotic associations with cultivated and wild plants and pathogenicity. The high importance of fungi in ecosystem processes contrasts with the incompleteness of our understanding of the patterns of fungal biogeography and the environmental factors that drive those patterns. To reduce this gap of knowledge, we collected and validated data published on the composition of soil fungal communities in terrestrial environments including soil and plant-associated habitats and made them publicly accessible through a user interface athttps://globalfungi.com. The GlobalFungi database contains over 600 million observations of fungal sequences across > 17 000 samples with geographical locations and additional metadata contained in 178 original studies with millions of unique nucleotide sequences (sequence variants) of the fungal internal transcribed spacers (ITS) 1 and 2 representing fungal species and genera. The study represents the most comprehensive atlas of global fungal distribution, and it is framed in such a way that third-party data addition is possible.

The carbon budget of coarse woody debris in a temperate broad-leaved secondary forest in Japan

Dead wood represents an important pool of carbon and nitrogen in forest ecosystems. This source of soil organic matter has diverse ecosystem functions that include, among others, carbon and nitrogen cycling. However, information is limited on how deadwood properties such as chemical composition, decomposer abundance, community composition, and age correlate and affect decomposition rate. Here, we targeted coarse dead wood of beech, spruce, and fir, namely snags and tree trunks (logs) in an old-growth temperate forest in central Europe; measured their decomposition rate as CO₂ production in situ; and analyzed their relationships with other measured variables. Respiration rate of dead wood showed strong positive correlation with acid phosphatase activity and negative correlation with lignin content. Fungal biomass (ergosterol content) and moisture content were additional predictors. Our results indicate that dead wood traits, including tree species, age, and position (downed/standing), affected dead wood chemical properties, microbial biomass, moisture condition, and enzyme activity through changes in fungal communities and ultimately influenced the decomposition rate of dead wood.

To separate CO₂ efflux from roots (R_r) and soil (R_s), we developed a system to measure R_r continuously. Using this system, seasonal variation in R_r was obtained in a temperate forest in Japan. We measured R_s, CO₂ efflux from mineral soil (R_m) and environmental factors simultaneously, and the characteristic and seasonality of R_r were analysed in comparison with R_s. R_r and R_s showed different responses to soil water content: R_s decreased with decreasing soil water content, whereas R_r peaked at relatively low soil water content. R_r/R_s decreased from 64.8% to 27.3% as soil water content increased from 0.075 to 0.225 cm cm⁻³. The relationship between respiration and temperature appears to change seasonally in response to phenological and biological factors. R_r showed clear seasonal variation as a function of soil temperature. During the growing period, R_r exhibited a higher rate at the same soil temperature than during other periods, which may be due to phenological influences such as fine root dynamics. R_s decreased during the summer despite high soil temperatures. The seasonal peak for R_s occurred earlier than that for soil temperature. R_r/R_s ranged between 25% and 60% over the course of the year. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2006.00216.x