FungalRoot: global online database of plant mycorrhizal associations

Abstract

The urgent need to better understand profound impacts of mycorrhizas on functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, along with recent debates on resolving plant mycorrhizal associations, indicate that there is a great need for a comprehensive data of plant mycorrhizal associations able to support testing of ecological, biogeographic and phylogenetic hypotheses.• Here present a database, FungalRoot, which summarizes publicly available data on plant mycorrhizal type and intensity of root colonization by mycorrhizal fungi, accompanied by rich meta-data. We collected and digitized data on plant mycorrhizal colonization intensity published until April 2019 in 9 globally most important languages. The data were assessed for quality and updated for plant taxonomy.• The FungalRoot database contains 36,303 species by site observations for 14,870 plant species, tripling the previously available amount in any compilation. The great majority of ectomycorrhizal and ericod mycorrhizal plants are trees and shrubs, 92% and 85% respectively. The majority of arbuscular mycorrhizal and of non-mycorrhizal plant species are herbaceous (50% and 70%).• Besides acting as a compilation of referenced observations, our publicly available database provides a recommendation list of plant mycorrhizal status for ecological and evolutionary analyses to promote research on the links between above-and belowground biodiversity and functioning of terrestrial ecosystems.

Regional-Scale In-Depth Analysis of Soil Fungal Diversity Reveals Strong pH and Plant Species Effects in Northern Europe

“…Based on estimates of basal area (or herb/shrub coverage), we calculated the relative abundance of EcM plants (Soudzilovskaia et al, 2020). Proportion of EcM plants and individual species were log-ratio-transformed (+0.01%) to vary from −4 (0.0%) to 0 (50.0%) to 4 (100.0%).…”

Methods and approaches to advance soil macroecology

“…For soil bacteria and fungi, on the contrary, characterization of morphological, physiological and phenological traits can be more challenging since isolation of individual species for trait measurements is not feasible in most cases (Krause et al., 2014; Zanne, Powell et al, 2020). Two recently published, large global databases, FungalRoot (Soudzilovskaia et al, 2020) and the Fungal Functional Database (FUNfun, Zanne, Abarenkov et al., 2020), however, will facilitate better understanding of trait composition of fungal communities, their interactions with plants, and their effects on world‐wide ecosystem functioning (Powell & Rillig, 2018). However, as with many taxa, fungal trait databases are often incomplete (Zanne, Abarenkov et al., 2020).…”

Negative effects of an allelopathic invader on AM fungal plant species drive community‐level responses

“…The global threat of mutualism disruption is particularly substantial for plant–mycorrhizal mutualisms because of their ubiquity (Soudzilovskaia et al 2020) and their importance for plant growth, function, and community dynamics (Van Der Heijden et al 2008). Invasive plants can impact plant–mycorrhizal mutualisms in various ways (Grove et al 2017): by directly competing with native plants, which weakens the native plant’s contribution to their mycorrhizal partnership (Grove et al 2017), by changing soil properties to alter the balance of resource exchange between plant and fungal partners (Allison et al 2006, Johnson 2010), or by directly inhibiting the mutualism via invader‐produced toxic secondary chemistry (allelochemicals) (Hale and Kalisz 2012).…”