Characterisation of wood decay and fungal diversity in cable car pylons in Svalbard

The ArcticAlpineDecay project conducted fieldwork on Svalbard in August 2022. From 22 cable car trestles wood samples (2x2x5 cm) were collected, two samples from the surface of the wooden poles close to the soil and two samples from above ground. Fungal communities were analyzed using DNA metabarcoding. DNA was extracted from 100 mg of wood powder per sample using a DNeasy PowerSoil Pro Kit (Qiagen) according to the manufacturer instructions. Total genomic DNA samples were sequenced at the BGI Genomics (Hong Kong, China) using the DNBSEQ-G400 (BGI Group, China) sequencing platform with 300 bp PE reads. Fungal communities were analyzed using amplicon sequencing of ITS1 regions for fungal species. High-quality reads were generated from raw data, using iTools Fqtools fqcheck (v0.25), qutadapt (v2.6) and readfq (v1.0).