Fungi are highly diverse organisms, which provide multiple ecosystem services.However, compared with charismatic animals and plants, the distribution patterns and conservation needs of fungi have been little explored. Here, we examined endemicity patterns, global change vulnerability and conservation priority areas for functional groups of soil fungi based on six global surveys using a high-resolution, long-read metabarcoding approach. We found that the endemicity of all fungi and most functional groups peaks in tropical habitats, including Amazonia, Yucatan, West-Central Africa, Sri Lanka, and New Caledonia, with a negligible island effect compared with plants and animals. We also found that fungi are predominantly vulnerable to drought, heat and land-cover change, particularly in dry tropical regions with high human population density. Fungal conservation areas of highest priority include herbaceous wetlands, tropical forests, and woodlands. We stress that more attention should be focused on the conservation of fungi, especially root symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi in tropical regions as well as unicellular early-diverging groups and macrofungi in general. Given the low overlap between the endemicity of fungi and macroorganisms, but high conservation needs in both groups, detailed analyses on distribution and conservation requirements are warranted for other microorganisms and soil organisms.

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Fungi are highly important biotic components of terrestrial ecosystems, but we still have a very limited understanding about their diversity and distribution. This data article releases a global soil fungal dataset of the Global Soil Mycobiome consortium (GSMc) to boost further research in fungal diversity, biogeography and macroecology. The dataset comprises 722,682 fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) derived from PacBio sequencing of full-length ITS and 18S-V9 variable regions from 3200 plots in 108 countries on all continents. The plots are supplied with geographical and edaphic metadata. The OTUs are taxonomically and functionally assigned to guilds and other functional groups. The entire dataset has been corrected by excluding chimeras, index-switch artefacts and potential contamination. The dataset is more inclusive in terms of geographical breadth and phylogenetic diversity of fungi than previously published data. The GSMc dataset is available over the PlutoF repository.

Marine fungal biodiversity remains vastly understudied, and even less is known of their biogeography and the processes responsible for driving these distributions in marine environments. We investigated the fungal communities associated with the seagrass Enhalus acoroides collected from Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia to test the hypothesis that fungal communities are homogeneous throughout the study area. Seagrass samples were separated into different structures (leaves, roots, and rhizomes), and a sediment sample was collected next to each plant. Amplicon sequencing of the fungal internal transcribed spacer 1 and subsequent analysis revealed significant differences in fungal communities collected from different locations and different structures. We show a significant pattern of distance decay, with samples collected close to each other having more similar fungal communities in comparison with those that are more distant, indicating dispersal limitations and/or differences in habitat type are contributing to the observed biogeographic patterns. These results add to our understanding of the seagrass ecosystem in an understudied region of the world that is also the global epicenter of seagrass diversity. This work has implications for seagrass management and conservation initiatives, and we recommend that fungal community composition be a consideration for any seagrass transplant or restoration programme.

Aim To test whether or not fungal communities associated with the widespread seagrass, Syringodium isoetifolium can be differentiated on either side of Wallace's line, a boundary line separating Asian and Australasian fauna. Additionally, we examine whether host multilocus genotype predicts fungal community composition. Location A total of 77 samples were collected from 14 sampling sites spanning the Indonesian archipelago. Methods We sequenced the fungal ITS1 gene using Illumia MiSeq technology and used a clustering‐free Divisive Amplicon Denoising Algorithm to infer ribosomal sequence variants. Data were analysed via non‐metric multidimensional scaling, Mantel tests and permutational multivariate analysis of variance. Binary and quantitative null models were used to determine whether results significantly deviated from random. Host genotype was determined by genotyping at 18 microsatellite loci and standard genetic analysis was performed in the R package APE. Results Significant differences in fungal community composition were detected on either side of Wallace's line (p = <.001 R2 = .040). A significant distance decay of similarity pattern was observed between ribosomal sequence variants and geographical distance (p = .001 R2 = .227) and several fungal ribosomal sequence variants were significantly associated with sampling sites found either east or west of Wallace's line. Main conclusions Fungi are generally considered to have excellent dispersal potentials and marine fungi have the potential to disperse far and wide in an environment that has no obvious barriers to dispersal. Despite this assumed excellent dispersal potential, we show that fungal communities on either side of Wallace's line are significantly different from one another. We speculate that limited dispersal and differences in habitat type are responsible for the observed pattern. Work examining biogeographical patterns in marine fungi is still in its infancy and further research is required to fully understand marine fungal biogeography.