Workshop: MacroMycoFunc - Forming an integrated understanding of function across fungi

Fungi are critical components of our world, contributing to ecosystem function and the global economy. As many fungi live out their lives at sizes smaller than can be perceived with the naked eye, there are large gaps in our knowledge related to the ecology and evolution of fungal diversity and function. It has only been in recent years with the advent of next-generation sequencing that we have begun to understand how fungal communities function in different ecological settings and how they have been structured over evolutionary time. Fungi are known to live their lives in different ways (i.e., ecological guilds) including as pathogens, endophytes, saprobes, and mycorrhizae, and the important functional traits they employ may differ within and across ecological guilds. However, there is frequently little discourse among biologists studying different fungal guilds. Finally, although next-generation sequencing is increasingly one of the main tools we use to study these organisms, we do not yet have community-approved standards and protocols, meaning it can be difficult to compare findings across studies. The objective of our working group is to use this emerging data stream to address previously unanswerable questions in fungal ecology and evolutionary biology at refined taxonomic and expanded spatial scales. The two workshops proposed here will bring together a diverse group of fungal ecologists and evolutionary biologists, as well as plant biologists who bring interdisciplinary expertise on ecological theory from a closely related field.