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

Abstract

Fungi are key players in vital ecosystem services, spanning carbon cycling, decomposition, symbiotic associations with cultural and wild plants and pathogenicity. The high importance of fungi in the ecosystem processes contrasts with the incompleteness of understanding of the patterns of fungal biogeography and the environmental factors that drive it. To close this gap of knowledge, we have here 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 at http://globalfungi.com. The GlobalFungi database contains over 650 million observations of fungal sequences across >20 000 samples with geographical locations and additional metadata contained in 207 original studies with millions of unique sequence variants of the fungal internal transcribed spacers (ITS) 1 and 2 representing fungal species and genera. As it is, the study represents the most comprehensive atlas of fungal distribution on the global scale open to further additions.