Kessy Abarenkov

Abstract Soil eukaryotes, including fungi, protists, plants, and animals, are central to biosphere functioning and resilience. The Global Standardised Soil Eukaryome Dataset (GloSED) is the first dataset encompassing the entire spectrum of soil eukaryotes, covering 4,063 sampling sites in 121 countries on all continents, revealing nearly one million operational taxonomic units. All samples were collected and analysed using a standardised protocol minimizing technical biases.

INTRODUCTION Host specificity is an important factor driving biodiversity and distribution of microorganisms besides abiotic environmental predictors such as pH and climate (Mallott & Amato, 2021; Perret et al., 2000). Specificity for living or dead hosts is particularly important in the fungal kingdom, which comprises ecologically important decomposers, pathogens and mycorrhizal root symbionts (Kennedy et al., 2015; Leonhardt et al., 2019; Põlme et al., 2018).