ABSTRACT
Climate change is a global phenomenon that is driven by elevated levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Fungi are affected by climate change, but they also contribute to climate through their effects on carbon (C) cycling in the biosphere. The effects of climate change on fungal communities depend on the historical climate regime that the community has experienced and on how it has shaped the limiting resources for fungi in the environment. The feedbacks between fungi and climate change are dependent on the speci›c ecologies of fungi as pathogens, mutualists of other organisms, and free-living decomposers (saprotrophs) that decompose dead organic material. Through these ecologies, fungi store carbon dioxide (CO2) in ecosystems either by building biomass and stabilizing C in soil or by respiring large amounts of the C to the atmosphere as CO2. These ecologies are encoded in the genomes of fungal lineages that
move forward into future climate regimes. However, these ecologies also shape fungal responses to individual climate change factors, such that the distribution of ecologies determines both responses of fungal community to climate change and their feedbacks to it. Most research on climate change and fungal communities has been done on terrestrial ecosystems, yet studies from marine and freshwater aquatic systems are accumulating.
