Global fungal spore emissions, review and synthesis of literature data

Abstract

The present paper summarizes fungal spore emission fluxes in different biomes. A literature study of more than 150 papers has been conducted and emission fluxes have been calculated based on 35 fungal spore concentration datasets. Biome area data has been derived from the World Resource Institute. Several assumptions and simplifications needed to be adopted while aggregating the data: results from different measurement methods have been treated equally, while diurnal and seasonal cycles have been neglected. Moreover flux data were aggregated to very coarse biome areas due to scarcity of data. Results show number fluxes per square meter and second of 3.13 for forest, 24.7 for shrub, 31.77 for crop, 0.03 for tundra, and 1.45 for grassland. No data were found for land ice. The annual mean global fluxes amount to 4×10<sup>−13</sup> kg m<sup>−2</sup> s<sup>−1</sup> as the best estimates, and 2.2×10<sup>−13</sup> kg m<sup>−2</sup> s<sup>−1</sup> and 8.9×10<sup>−13</sup> kg m<sup>−2</sup> s<sup>−1</sup> as the low and high estimate, respectively