Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro‐organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there still exist key gaps in our ecological knowledge of this kingdom, especially related to function. Trait‐based approaches have been instrumental in strengthening our understanding of plant functional ecology and, as such, provide excellent models for deepening our understanding of fungal functional ecology in ways that complement insights gained from traditional and ‐omics‐based techniques. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge of fungal functional ecology, taxonomy and systematics and introduce a novel database of fungal functional traits (FunFun). FunFun is built to interface with other databases to explore and predict how fungal functional diversity varies by taxonomy, guild, and other evolutionary or ecological grouping variables. To highlight how a quantitative trait‐based approach can provide new insights, we describe multiple targeted examples and end by suggesting next steps in the rapidly growing field of fungal functional ecology.

中文翻译：

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真菌功能生态学：为植物相关真菌带来基于性状的方法

真菌在生态系统中扮演着许多重要的角色。它们促进植物获取养分和水，充当通过土壤、水和大气循环碳和养分的腐烂剂，并且是宏观生物种群的主要调节剂。尽管技术进步正在改进真菌的检测和识别，但我们对这个王国的生态知识仍然存在关键空白，尤其是与功能相关的知识。基于性状的方法有助于加强我们对植物功能生态学的理解，因此，以补充从传统和基于组学的技术中获得的见解的方式，为加深我们对真菌功能生态学的理解提供了极好的模型。在这篇综述中，我们综合了真菌功能生态学的最新知识，分类学和系统学，并引入了一个新的真菌功能性状数据库 (FunFun)。FunFun 旨在与其他数据库连接，以探索和预测真菌功能多样性如何因分类、行会和其他进化或生态分组变量而异。为了强调基于数量性状的方法如何提供新的见解，我们描述了多个有针对性的例子，最后提出了快速发展的真菌功能生态学领域的下一步。