Congruency in fungal phenology patterns across dataset sources and scales

As citizen science and digitization projects bring greater and larger datasets to the scientific realm, we must address the comparability of results across varying sources and spatial scales. Independently assembled fungal fruit body datasets from Switzerland and the UK were available at large, national-scales and more intensively surveyed, local-scales. Phenology responses of fungi between these datasets at different scales (national, intermediate and local) resembled one another. Consistently with time, the fruiting season initiated earlier and extended later. Phenology better correlated across data sources and scales in the UK, which contain less landscape and environmental heterogeneity than Switzerland. Species-specific responses in seasonality varied more than overall responses, but generally fruiting start dates were later for most Swiss species compared with UK species, while end dates were later for both. The coherency of these results, across the data sources, supports the use of presence-only data obtained by multiple recorders, and even across heterogeneous landscapes, for global change phenology research.