Fungal spore seasons advanced across the US over two decades of climate change

Abstract

Phenological shifts due to climate change have been extensively studied in plants and animals. Yet, the responses of fungal spores--crucial organisms that play important roles in ecosystems and act as airborne allergens--remain understudied. This knowledge gap in global change biology hinders our understanding of its ecological and public health implications. To bridge this gap, we acquired a long-term (2003 [~] 2022), large-scale (the continental US) dataset of airborne fungal spores collected by the US National Allergy Bureau. We first pre-processed the spore data by gap-filling and smoothing. Afterward, we extracted ten metrics describing the phenology (e.g., start and end of season) and intensity (e.g., peak concentration and integral) of fungal spore seasons. These metrics were derived using two complementary but not mutually exclusive approaches--ecological and public health approaches, defined as percentiles of total spore concentration and allergenic thresholds of spore concentration, respectively. Using linear mixed effects models, we quantified annual temporal shifts in these metrics across the continental US. We revealed a significant advancement in the onset of the spore seasons defined in both ecological (11 days, 95% confidence interval: 0.4 [~] 23 days) and public health (22 days, 6 [~] 38 days) approaches over two decades. Nevertheless, the total spore concentration in an annual cycle and in a spore allergy season tended to decrease over time. The earlier start of the spore season was significantly correlated with climatic variables, such as warmer temperatures and altered precipitations. Overall, our findings suggest possible climate-driven advanced fungal spore seasons, highlighting the importance of climate change mitigation and adaptation in public health decision-making.