Historical datasets of living communities are important because they can be used to
document creeping shifts in species compositions. Such a historical data set exists for
alpine fungi. From 1941 to 1953, the Swiss geologist Jules Favre visited yearly the region
of the Swiss National Park and recorded the occurring fruiting bodies of fungi >1 mm
(so-called “macrofungi”) in the alpine zone. Favre can be regarded as one of the pioneers
of alpine fungal ecology not least because he noted location, elevation, geology, and
associated plants during his numerous excursions. However, some relevant information
is only available in his unpublished field-book. Overall, Favre listed 204 fungal species in
26 sampling sites, with 46 species being previously unknown. The analysis of his data
revealed that the macrofungi recorded belong to two major ecological groups, either they
are symbiotrophs and live in ectomycorrhizal associations with alpine plant hosts, or they
are saprotrophs and decompose plant litter and soil organic matter. The most frequent
fungi were members of Inocybe and Cortinarius, which form ectomycorrhizas with Dryas
octopetala or the dwarf alpine Salix species. The scope of the present study was to
combine Favre’s historical dataset with more recent data, either with the “SwissFungi”
database or with data from major studies of the French and German Alps, and with the
data from novel high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques of soils from the Swiss
Alps. Results of the latter application revealed, that problems associated with these new
techniques are manifold and species determination remains often unclear. At this point,
the fungal taxa collected by Favre and deposited as exsiccata at the “Conservatoire et
Jardin Botaniques de la Ville de Genève” could be used as a reference sequence dataset
for alpine fungal studies. In conclusion, it can be postulated that new improved databases
are urgently necessary for the near future, particularly, with regard to investigating fungal
communities from alpine regions using new techniques.