Global Spore Sampling Project: A global, standardized dataset of airborne fungal DNA
Otso Ovaskainen, Nerea Abrego, Brendan Furneaux, Bess Hardwick, Panu Somervuo, Isabella Palorinne, Nigel R. Andrew, Ulyana Babiy, Tan Bao, Gisela Bazzano, Svetlana Bondarchuk, Timothy C. Bonebrake, Georgina Brennan, Syndonia Bret-Harte, Claus Bässler, Luciano Cagnolo, Erin K. Cameron, Elodie Chapurlat, Simon Creer, Luigi Paolo D’Acqui, Natasha de Vere, Marie‐Laure Desprez‐Loustau, Michel A. K. Dongmo, Ida Bomholt Dyrholm Jacobsen, Brian L. Fisher, Miguel Flores de Jesus, Gregory S. Gilbert, Gareth Griffith, Anna Gritsuk, Andrin Gross, Håkan Grudd, Panu Halme, Rachid Hanna, Jannik Hansen, Lars Holst Hansen, Apollon Hegbe, Sarah Hill, Ian D. Hogg, Jenni Hultman, Kevin D. Hyde, Nicole A. Hynson, Natalya Ivanova, Petteri Karisto, Deirdre Kerdraon, Anastasia Knorre, Irmgard Krisai‐Greilhüber, Juri Kurhinen, Maria Kuzmina, Nicolas Lecomte, Erin Lecomte, Viviana Loaiza, E Lundin, Alexander Meire, Armin Mešić, Otto Miettinen, Norman Monkhause, Peter E. Mortimer, Jörg Müller, R. Henrik Nilsson, Puani Yannick Nonti, Jenni Nordén, Björn Nordén, Claudia Paz, Petri Pellikka, Danilo Pereira, Geoff Petch, Juha‐Matti Pitkänen, Flavius Popa, Caitlin Potter, Jenna Purhonen, Sanna Pätsi, Abdullah Rafiq, Dimby Raharinjanahary, Niklas Rakos, Achala R. Rathnayaka, Katrine Raundrup, Yu. A. Rebriev, Jouko Rikkinen, Hanna M.K. Rogers, Andrey Rogovsky, Yuri Rozhkov, Kadri Runnel, Annika Saarto, Anton Savchenko, Markus Schlegel, Niels Martin Schmidt, Sebastian Seibold, Carsten Ambelas Skjøth, Elisa Stengel, Svetlana Sutyrina, Ilkka Syvänperä, Leho Tedersoo, Jebidiah Timm, Laura Tipton, Hirokazu Toju, Maria Uscka-Perzanowska, Michelle van der Bank, F.H. van der Bank, Bryan Vandenbrink, Stefano Ventura
Abstract
Abstract Novel methods for sampling and characterizing biodiversity hold great promise for re-evaluating patterns of life across the planet. The sampling of airborne spores with a cyclone sampler, and the sequencing of their DNA, have been suggested as an efficient and well-calibrated tool for surveying fungal diversity across various environments. Here we present data originating from the Global Spore Sampling Project, comprising 2,768 samples collected during two years at 47 outdoor locations across the world. Each sample represents fungal DNA extracted from 24 m 3 of air. We applied a conservative bioinformatics pipeline that filtered out sequences that did not show strong evidence of representing a fungal species. The pipeline yielded 27,954 species-level operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Each OTU is accompanied by a probabilistic taxonomic classification, validated through comparison with expert evaluations. To examine the potential of the data for ecological analyses, we partitioned the variation in species distributions into spatial and seasonal components, showing a strong effect of the annual mean temperature on community composition.