USING FOSSIL FUNGI AS PALEOECOLOGICAL AND PALEOCLIMATE PROXIES: WHY AND HOW?

Fungi are key providers of ecosystem services; fungal assemblages on land can be biome specific and vary with climate. Using fossil fungal assemblages to interpret paleoecology has, to date, relied primarily upon association with other taxa of known affinity, such as plant palynomorphs, because so few fossil taxa were correlated with extant taxa. Advances in fungal literature accessibility, fungal database development, and the NPP ID site have made it possible to correlate fossil fungal form types with extant taxa, thus permitting identification of extant families and genera in deep time that had previously only been suggested by calibrated molecular phylogenies. Recent work by the Fungi in a Warmer World team has demonstrated that with this information, the nearest living relative method for paleoclimate and paleoecological interpretation can be applied to fungal assemblages. Here we present our workflow for going from fossil fungal assemblages to ecological associations and paleoclimate interpretations.