Cons and prons of metabarcode analysis of fungi for fungal conservation: implications from a large scale monitoring of soil fungi in Swedish forests …

2018

A challenge for getting adequate information of the identity and composition of soil fungal diversity, hence for fungal conservation, is the largely cryptic life of fungi. Several years’ lack of sporocarps does not necessarily imply absence of fungal species as mycelial activity may poorly correlate to the irregular and strongly weather dependent production of sporocarps. Furthermore, sporocarps are short-lived, morphological identification of many taxa require specialist competence and several species have inconspicuous, or may even lack, sporocars. One approach to circumvent these difficulties, and to complement sporocarp monitoring, is to use metabarcode analysis of e.g. soil and wood to…