Abstract
Abstract. Fungi are ubiquitous in the atmosphere and may play an important role in atmospheric processes. We investigated the composition and diversity of fungal communities over the Amazon rainforest canopy and compared these communities to fungal communities found in terrestrial environments. We characterized the total fungal community and the metabolically active portion of the community using high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing and compared these data to predictions generated by a mass-balance model. We found that the total community was primarily comprised of fungi from the phylum Basidiomycota. In contrast, the active community was primarily composed of members of the phylum Ascomycota and included a high relative abundance of lichen fungi, which were not detected in the total community. The relative abundance of Basidiomycota and Ascomycota in the total and active communities was consistent with our model predictions, suggesting that this result was driven by the relative size and number of spores produced by these groups. When compared to other environments, fungal communities in the atmosphere were most similar to communities found in tropical soils and leaf surfaces. Our results demonstrate that there are significant differences in the composition of the total and active fungal communities in the atmosphere, and that lichen fungi, which have been shown to be efficient ice nucleators, may be abundant members of active atmospheric fungal communities over the forest canopy.
Highlights
Fungi are critical to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and may play an important role in the functioning of the atmosphere
The site is operated by the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazonia (INPA) under the Large-Scale Biosphere–Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) program (Martin et al, 2010)
There were several taxa detected in the total community with ice nucleation activity including Acremonium, Cladosporium, Fusarium, and Rhizopus (Table S4)
Summary
Fungi are critical to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems and may play an important role in the functioning of the atmosphere. Fungi are abundant and ubiquitous in the atmosphere, with an estimated global land surface emission rate of 50 Tg yr−1 for fungal spores alone (Elbert et al, 2007). Cellular fragments, and cell-free biological particles have the potential to affect precipitation by acting as ice and cloud condensation nuclei (Després et al, 2012; Morris et al, 2013; Pouleur et al, 1992; Richard et al, 1996), and metabolically active fungi sampled from the atmosphere are capable of transforming compounds known to play a major role in atmospheric chemistry, including carboxylic acids (Ariya, 2002; Côté et al, 2008; Vaïtilingom et al, 2013), formaldehyde, and hydrogen peroxide (Vaïtilingom et al, 2013). Active vegetative cells have the potential to transform atmospheric com-
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