Publication details
Big data integration: Pan-European fungal species observations' assembly for addressing contemporary questions in ecology and global change biology
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Fungal Biology Reviews |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Web | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1749461316300926#! |
| Doi | http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fbr.2017.01.001 |
| Keywords | Biogeography; Citizen science; Fungi; Global change; Meta-database; Open-source |
| Description | Species occurrence observations are increasingly available for scientific analyses through citizen science projects and digitization of museum records, representing a largely untapped ecological resource. When combined with open-source data, there is unparalleled potential for understanding many aspects of the ecology and biogeography of organisms. Here we describe the process of assembling a pan-European mycological meta-database (ClimFun) and integrating it with open-source data to advance the fields of macroecology and biogeography against a backdrop of global change. Initially 7.3 million unique fungal species fruit body records, spanning nine countries, were processed and assembled into 6 million records of more than 10,000 species. This is an extraordinary amount of fungal data to address macro-ecological questions. We provide two examples of fungal species with different life histories, one ectomycorrhizal and one wood decaying, to demonstrate how such continental-scale meta-databases can offer unique insights into climate change effects on fungal phenology and fruiting patterns in recent decades. |