Data and scripts for: Airborne DNA reveals predictable spatial and seasonal dynamics of fungi

Fungi are among the most diverse and ecologically important kingdoms of life. However, the distributional ranges of fungi remain largely unknown, as do the ecological mechanisms that shape their distributions. To provide an integrated view of the spatial and seasonal dynamics of fungi, we implemented a globally distributed standardised aerial sampling of fungal spores. The vast majority of OTUs were detected only within one climatic zone, and the spatio-temporal patterns of species richness and community composition were mostly explained by annual mean air temperature. Tropical regions hosted the highest fungal diversity except for lichenized, ericoid mycorrhizal, and ectomycorrhizal fungi, which reached their peak diversity in temperate regions. The sensitivity in climatic responses was associated with phylogenetic relatedness, suggesting that large-scale distributions of some fungal groups are partially constrained by their ancestral niche. There was a strong phylogenetic signal in seasonal sensitivity, suggesting that some groups of fungi have retained their ancestral trait of sporulating only for a short period. Overall, our results show that the hyperdiverse kingdom of fungi follows globally highly predictable spatial and temporal dynamics, with seasonality in both species richness and community composition increasing with latitude. Our study reports patterns resembling those described for other major groups of organisms, thus making a major contribution to the long-standing debate on whether organisms with microbial lifestyles follow the global biodiversity paradigms known for macro-organisms. The analyses presented in the paper can be reproduced with the R-script pipeline provided here. The starting point for the scripts is the datafile allData.RData that was published originally by Ovaskainen et al. Data from: Global Spore Sampling Project: A global standardized dataset of airborne fungal DNA. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10435615 (2024). The datafile allData.RData is provided also here for convenience, and it includes the following three objects: metadata, taxonomy, and otu.table (see Ovaskainen et al. for details). The script pipeline consists of the following elements (for deltails, see the Methods of the paper): Scripts S01: data preparation S01.1_download_clim_data.R. This script downloads daily climatic data for the entire world. S01.2_select_and_preprocess_clim_data.R. This script selects the data relevant for the study locations and prepr