Project description:Fungal diversity present in soil of King George Island, Antarctica assessed by environmental DNA metabarcoding through high throughput sequencing
Project description:Since the floristic study of lichens at the Barton and Weaver Peninsulas of King George Island in 2006, there have been intense investigations of the lichen flora of the two peninsulas as well as that of Fildes Peninsula and Ardley Island in Maxwell Bay, King George Island, South Shetland Islands, maritime Antarctic. In this study, a total of 104 species belonging to 53 genera, are identified from investigations of lichens that were collected in austral summer seasons from 2008 to 2016. Phenotypic and molecular analyses were incorporated for taxonomic identification. In particular, 31 species are found to be endemic to the Antarctic and 22 species are newly recorded to the Maxwell Bay region. Lepra dactylina, Stereocaulon caespitosum, and Wahlenbergiella striatula are newly recorded in the Antarctic, and the previously reported taxon Cladonia furcata is excluded from the formerly recorded list due to misidentification. We also provide ecological and geographical information about lichen associations and habitat preferences.
Project description:Glacial retreat is one of the most conspicuous signs of warming in Antarctic regions. Glacier soils harbor an active microbial community of decomposers, and under the continuous retraction of glaciers, the soil starts to present a gradient of physical, chemical, and biological factors reflecting regional changes over time. Little is known about the biological nature of fungi in Antarctic glacier soils. In this sense, this work aimed at studying the behavior of fungal community structure from samples of glacier soil collected after glacial retreat (Collins Glacier). A total of 309 fungi distributed in 19 genera were obtained from eleven soil samples. Representatives of the genera Pseudogymnoascus (Ascomycota) and Mortierella (Mortierellomycota) were the most abundant isolates in all samples. The data revealed the presence of filamentous fungi belonging to the phylum Basidiomycota, rarely found in Antarctica. Analysis of the generalized linear models revealed that the distance from the glacier as well as phosphorus and clay were able to modify the distribution of fungal species. Environmental variations proved to have influenced the genera Pseudogymnoascus and Pseudeutorium.
Project description:The observational data described here was collected between 28 February 2011 and 30 November 2015. The data analysis and interpretation were published in the article "Surface radiation balance and weather conditions on a non-glaciated coastal area in the Antarctic region" [1]. An instrumented tower located on the non-glaciated coastal area of the of the Brazilian Antarctic Comandante Ferraz Station, at King George Island, Antarctic Peninsula was used. It was collected data of air temperature and relative humidity, wind speed and direction, barometric pressure, incident and reflected shortwave radiation, longwave radiation emitted by atmosphere and by surface, and net radiation with a sampling frequency of 0.1 Hz. The data was stored as 5-min averages and automatically transmitted to the Air-Sea Interaction Laboratory, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. The dataset is hosted in the Mendeley repository.