**1. Introduction**

210 The Dynamical Processes of Biodiversity – Case Studies of Evolution and Spatial Distribution

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Eastern Kamchatka and western coasts of Bering Sea. In: *Litoral' Beringova morya i yugo-vostochnoi Kamchatki [Intertidal zone of Bering Sea and south-eastern Kamchatka]*.

intertidal zone of the western part of Bering Sea. In: *Zakonomernosti raspredeleniya i ekologiya pribrezhnykh biotsenozov [Regularities of distribution and ecology of the coastal* 

and Commander Islands. *Proceedings of the 10th Intenational Conference "Conservation of biodiversity of Kamchatka and coastal waters,* pp. 232-235, ISBN 978-5-9610-0133-4,

Sea. III. Karaginskii Gulf. In: *Proceedings of Kamchatka Branch of Pacific Institute of Geography,* R.S. Moiseev, (Ed.), 47-89, Kamchatsky Pechatny Dvor Publishing House, ISBN 5-85857-062-3, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskii, Russia, Issue 5 (In Fungi are cryptic, understudied and hyperdiverse organisms. In this chapter I address the wonders of fungal diversity, including recent advances on the understanding of the evolution of the kingdom *Fungi*, approaches to documenting and interpreting fungal diversity, and current efforts concerning fungal conservation.

Fungi are eukaryotic organisms that cannot produce their own energy and depend on enzymatic processes to break down biopolymers that are then absorbed for nutrition. The kingdom *Fungi* encompasses tremendous biological diversity, with members spanning a wide array of lifestyles, forms, habitats, and sizes. Fungi are sister to animals (fig. 1) and include thousands of lineages, from the mushroom forming fungi, to yeasts, rusts, smuts, molds, and more or less conspicuous critters with interesting morphologies. Fungi complete indispensable ecological roles, most notably decomposition processes, but are also involved in important symbiotic associations and are known to include noteworthy parasites (Alexopoulus, 1996).

Fungi have been known and used by humans for centuries, but mycology (the scientific study of fungi) traces ist beginnings to the 18th century, with the development of the microscope (Ainsworth, 1976). While much has been discovered since then, fungi remain today a cryptic and understudied group of organisms. Recent estimates point to 1.5 million fungal species on the planet (Hawksworth, 2001) of which only ~7% have been described (Kirk et al, 2008). Furthermore, fungi assemble in very species-rich communities, making the full documentation of fungal diversity in targeted sites a particularly challenging task. Given the important roles fungi play in the maintenance and functioning of ecosystems, such documentation is often combined with functional perspectives, aimed at understanding the ecology of fungi. Advances in molecular techniques have formed the base for a boost in studies concerning fungal diversity, and the fast development of nextgeneration sequencing technologies promises further progress towards a more thorough understanding of fungal diversity and function.

Our current limited knowledge of fungal diversity and biology complicates an assessment of the conservation status of fungal species and has hindered the development of conservation tools and efforts. Furthermore, the absence of expedite and adequate methods to document fungal demographics has made it extremelly difficult to fit fungi into the efforts to currently established IUCN conservation categories. There have been, however,

Fungal Diversity – An Overview 213

species belonguing to all groups of fungi (McLaughlin et al 2009). The result was the most recent comprehensive classification of the fungal kingdom to date, based on well-supported monophyletic groups (Hibbet et al 2007, fig. 2). This fungal tree of life includes only true fungi, and does not consider non-fungal groups traditionally studied by mycologists, such as Oomycetes and slime molds. It does, however, include microsporidians (unicellular obligate endoparasitic organisms with highly reduced genomes and mithochondria (Peyretaillade et al., 2008)), several lineages of chytrids (flagelatted fungi) and zygomycetes, including the Glomeromycota (obligate symbionts of photoautotrophs that are suggested to have been crucial to the process of land colonization by plants (Pirozynski and Malloch,

Around 98% of all described fungal species belong to the subkingdom *Dikarya* composed of *Basidiomycota* and *Ascomycota* (fig. 2). The former includes subphyla *Pucciniomycotina* (rusts, pathogens specialized in infecting plants), *Ustilagomycotina* (true smuts and some yeasts, mostly plant pathogens), and *Agaricomycotina* (including the vast majority of mushroomforming fungi). *Ascomycota*, is also comprised of three subphyla, *Taphrinomycotina* (yeast-like

Fig. 2. The fungal tree of life (adapted from Hibbett et al., 2007 and McLaughlin et al., 2009), showing the higher level clades and the unresolved basal polytomy. The terminations – mycota refer to phyla and –mycotina to subphyla; 'chytrids' and 'zygomycetes' are informal

1975)).

non-monophyletic groups.

recent concerted efforts to bring fungi to conservation debates, such as the newly created Society for the Conservation of Fungi.

Fig. 1. A simplified tree of life, showing the relationships between three eukaryotic groups: fungi and animals are sister groups, with plants as their next closest relative. Taken from the tree of life web project (http://tolweb.org/tree/).
