Temporal Trends of the Airborne Fungi and Their Functional Relations with the Environment in a Suburban Site

Abstract

The temporal trends and the environmen- tal factors influencing the airborne fungi of a Turin suburb (Italy) were investigated over two years. Fun- gal propagules were collected fortnightly with a sin- gle-stage volumetric sieve sampler onto PDA supple- mented with streptomycin and chloramphenicol. The data for each year (including those for the pre- vious year's monitoring of the same site) were com- pared and analyzed with Canonical Correspondence Analysis. The fungal aerosols for the three consecu- tive years displayed many common features. There was a regularly repeated dominant and stable com- ponent (mainly composed of Cladosporium, Penicil- lium, Aspergillus, Epicoccum, Alternaria, yeasts, basid- iomycete and sterile moniliaceous and dematiaceous mycelia). Many other less abundant and less frequent entities were also recurrent. Species of Cladosporium and Penicillium and yeasts dominate Turin's fungal aerosol. The qualitative and quantitative variations of this airborne fungal community were significantly in- fluenced (P ' 0.01) by the factors that have the greatest influence on Turin's climate, namely tem- perature, relative humidity and rainfall. These envi- ronmental variables appear to act selectively on the taxonomic and biological groups of the airborne fun-