Biodiversity of aquatic fungi in China

Aquatic fungi include those that occur in freshwater, marine, and brackish water habitats. In China, aquatic fungi have been investigated since 1920s. In this paper, we summarized the known data and provided a comprehensive list of aquatic fungi in China. To date, 969 species have been reported in China, including 782 and 213 species from freshwater and marine habitats, respectively, with 26 overlaps. The 782 freshwater species comprise 25 chytridiomycetes, 256 ascomycetes, 416 hyphomycetes, 63 oomycetes, and 22 zygomycetes. The 213 marine species comprise 117 ascomycetes, 48 hyphomycetes, 1 basidiomycete, 5 oomycetes, and 42 yeasts. Although the aquatic fungi in China are still poorly investigated, with most areas of the territory untouched, the number of recorded species is higher than most of the other countries in the world. The investigation of aquatic fungi in China is patchy as most species were reported from the southwest areas. There is little overlapped taxa found on different substrata, which implies that most aquatic fungi may have a substrate preference.