DOI: 10.5061/dryad.9121q
title: Data from: Give me a sample of air and I will tell which species are found from your region – molecular identification of fungi from airborne spore samples

description: Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms, they play major roles in
 ecosystem functioning, and are important for human health, food
 production, and nature conservation. Our knowledge on fungal diversity and
 fungal ecology is however still very limited, in part because surveying
 and identifying fungi is time demanding and requires expert knowledge. We
 present a method that allows anyone to generate a list of fungal species
 likely to occur in a region of interest, with minimal effort and without
 requiring taxonomical expertise. The method consists of using a cyclone
 sampler to acquire fungal spores directly from the air to an Eppendorf
 tube, and applying DNA barcoding with probabilistic species identification
 to generate a list of species from the sample. We tested the feasibility
 of the method by acquiring replicate air samples from different
 geographical regions within Finland. Our results show that air sampling is
 adequate for regional-level surveys, with samples collected &gt;100 km
 apart varying but samples collected &lt;10 km apart not varying in
 their species composition. The data show marked phenology, and thus that
 obtaining a representative species list requires aerial sampling that
 covers the entire fruiting season. In sum, aerial sampling combined with
 probabilistic molecular species identification offers a highly effective
 method for generating a species list of airborne dispersed fungi. The
 method presented here has the potential to revolutionize fungal surveys,
 as it provides a highly cost-efficient way to include fungi as a part of
 large-scale biodiversity assessments and monitoring programs.
description: Fungi identified from
 airborne spore samples in FinlandThe zip file contains
 two excel files which correspond to the species x samples and covariates x
 samples data matrices, respectively. In the species dataset, the columns
 are the species and the rows are the samples. In the covariates dataset,
 the columns are the covariates and the rows are the samples. The sheets in
 the species dataset correspond to (1) species-level identifications with
 0.5 reliability threshold (denoted as Species 0.5), (2) species-level
 identifications with 0.9 reliability threshold (denoted as Species 0.9),
 (3)genus-level identifications with 0.5 reliability threshold (denoted as
 Genus 0.5), (4) genus-level identifications with 0.9 reliability threshold
 (denoted as Genus 0.9), (5) wood-inhabiting fungal species-level
 identifications with 0.5 reliability threshold (denoted as Wood-inhabiting
 fungi 0.5), (6) wood-inhabiting fungal species-level identifications with
 0.9 reliability threshold (denoted as Wood-inhabiting fungi
 0.9).Data.zipSequence data of the spore samplesThis file contains the sequence data of the 134 spore samples. The sequence data is provided in the fasta format, the file name being coded as sample_n.seq, where n = 1...134 is the sample id (see Table S1 in the Supplemental information).sequence data.zip