Predicting provenance of forensic soil samples:linking soil to ecological habitats by metabarcoding and supervised classification

Environmental DNA (eDNA) is increasingly applied in ecological studies, including studies with the primary purpose of criminal investigation, in which eDNA from soil can be used to pair samples or reveal sample provenance. We collected soil eDNA samples as part of a large national biodiversity research project across 130 sites in Denmark. We investigated the potential for soil eDNA metabarcoding in predicting provenance in terms of environmental conditions, habitat type and geographic regions. We used linear regression for predicting environmental gradients of light, soil moisture, pH and nutrient status (represented by Ellenberg Indicator Values, EIVs) and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis (QDA) to predict habitat type and geographic region. eDNA data performed relatively well as a predictor of environmental gradients (R2 > 0.81). Its ability to discriminate between habitat types was variable, with high accuracy for certain forest types and low accuracy for heathland, which was poorly predicted. Geographic region was also less accurately predicted by eDNA. We demonstrated the application of provenance prediction in forensic science by evaluating and discussing two mock crime scenes. Here, we listed the plant species from annotated sequences, which can further aid in identifying the likely habitat or, in case of rare species, a geographic region. Predictions of environmental gradients and habitat types together give an overall accurate description of a crime scene, but care should be taken when interpreting annotated sequences, e.g. due to erroneous assignments in GenBank. Our approach demonstrates that important habitat properties can be derived from soil eDNA, and exemplifies a range of potential applications of eDNA in forensic ecology

The UNITE database for molecular identification and taxonomic communication of fungi and other eukaryotes : sequences, taxa and classifications reconsidered

Acknowledgements We acknowledge Marie Zirk for her work in designing the UNITE logotype and creating the visual abstract for this article. Funding UNITE database development is financed by the Estonian Research Council [PRG1170]; European Union's Horizon 2020 project BGE [101059492]. The PlutoF digital infrastructure is supported by the European Union's Horizon 2020 project BiCIKL [101007492]; Estonian Research Infrastructure roadmap project DiSSCo Estonia. Funding for open access charge: UNITE Community. Conflict of interest statement. None declared.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

FungalTraits:A user-friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies. Over the past decades, rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats. Yet, in spite of the progress of molecular methods, knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging. In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels. Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and Fun(Fun) together with involvement of expert knowledge, we reannotated 10,210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera, respectively. This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera, designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental studies. In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses, the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697,413 fungal ITS sequences. On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92,623 fungal species hypotheses at 1% dissimilarity threshold

Sjeldne, hvite–lysoker slørsopper (Cortinarius) av seksjon Calochroi fra kalklindeskog i Sørøst-Norge

Rare, whitish–pale ochre Cortinarius species of sect. Calochroi from calcareous Tilia forests in South East NorwaySjeldne, hvite–lysoker slørsopper (Cortinarius) av seksjon Calochroi fra kalklindeskog i Sørøst-NorgepublishedVersio

<i>Cortinarius koldingensis</i>—a new species of <i>Cortinarius</i>, subgenus <i>Phlegmacium </i>related to <i>Cortinarius sulfurinus</i>

Frøslev, Tobias Guldberg, Jeppesen, Thomas Stjernegaard, Dima, Bálint (2015): Cortinarius koldingensis -a new species of Cortinarius, subgenus Phlegmacium related to Cortinarius sulfurinus. Mycol Progress 14 (73): 1-7, DOI: 10.1007/s11557-015-1098-