Despite host‐fungal symbiotic interactions being ubiquitous in all ecosystems, understanding how symbiosis has shaped the ecology and evolution of fungal spores that are involved in dispersal and colonization of their hosts has been ignored in life‐history studies. We assembled a spore morphology database covering over 26,000 species of free‐living to symbiotic fungi of plants, insects and humans and found more than eight orde...

The carbon flux from woody debris, a crucial uncertainty within global carbon‐climate models, is simultaneously affected by climate, site environment and species‐based variation in wood quality. In the first global analysis attempting to explicitly tease out the wood quality contribution to decomposition, we found support for our hypothesis that, under a common climate, interspecific differences in wood traits affect woody deb...

Worldwide decomposition rates depend both on climate and the legacy of plant functional traits as litter quality. To quantify the degree to which functional differentiation among species affects their litter decomposition rates, we brought together leaf trait and litter mass loss data for 818 species from 66 decomposition experiments on six continents. We show that: (i) the magnitude of species‐driven differences is much large...