Monitoring of Fungal Diversity and Microclimate in Nine Different Museum Depots.

Within museum depots, the largest part of all heritage collections is stored. Often, the preservation of highly sensitive objects is an ongoing challenge, as the materials are constantly subjected to and influenced by ever-present environmental factors-above all the surrounding climate and other physicochemical processes. Biological degradation is also a major risk for collections. Fungal infestation poses a particular threat, in many regions increasingly the result of climate change. Models for damage prediction and risk assessment are still underdeveloped and require a more substantial database. Approaching this need, nine museum depots and archives were selected in this study. Two years of monitoring the indoor microclimate with thermohygrometric sensors, investigating fungal abundance and diversity through culture-dependent and -independent (metagenomics) approaches, and the collection of relevant additional information resulted in a vast amount of diverse data. The main fungal genera identified through cultivation were