Revelations for global change and conservation: determining European fungal species’ patterns via a large-scale fruit body ‘meta-database’

PRESENTATION:The driving forces to the geographical structuring of fungi remain notably irresolute, despite well documented trends for a variety of plant and animal groups. This information is critical to planning and mitigating potentially negative consequences of global change, and especially related to conservation. We identified the major geographical and environmental gradients structuring fungal assemblages for two main nutritional modes, saprotrophic and ectomycorrhizal fungi, through the use of 4.9 million European fungal fruit body observations. For both fungal nutritional modes, mean annual temperature correlated most with the first gradient identified that structured assemblages.…