Checklist of Algerian fungi – Part 1 : Protozoan Fungal Analogues ( Myxomycetes )

Informations on Algerian mycobiota are scattered through a wide array of journals, books, dissertations and the lack of comprehensive catalogs or checklists makes difficult to apprehend it diversity. By screening all available bibliographic sources and herbaria catalogues it was possible to delineate 97 species belonging to 31 genera and from which 9 species have not been yet reported in the literature for Algeria. This checklist is the first comprehensive species list fully dedicated to Algerian Protozoan Fungal Analogues.


Introduction
Since 1799 to the present days, Algeria has been the subject of intense mycological exploration, as evidenced by the abundant literature on Algerian mycobiota, the great number of new species provided to science and the considerable number of fungal specimens held by many herbaria worldwide.However despite this the diversity of Algerian mycoflora is relatively unknown by mycologists because the information on Algerian fungi is scattered over a large number of contributions most often written in French and that it does not exist until now a flora, a catalog or even a checklist of Algerian fungi.
In an attempt to provide a new impetus to mycological research in Algeria, which has suffered from the absence of a recent synthetic contribution dealing with Algerian fungal diversity, we compiled a checklist of Algerian fungi based on published sources and herbaria specimens catalogues.This checklist elaborated from nearly 10.000 records gathered from literature and herbaria catalogues survey indicate that Algerian fungal diversity comprises more than 3.100 specific or infraspecific taxa spread over more than 1000 genera.Since this list is too large to be published in a single contribution we have decided to split it into several contributions under a common title and different subtitles relating to the groups of fungi taken in consideration.
Our first contribution is dedicated to a group of organisms that although they are protozoa, are still studied mainly by mycologists under the denomination of Myxomycetes, Myxomycota, Mycetozoa or Protozoan Fungal like Analogs (PFA).The PFA commonly called also slime molds, are a cosmopolitan group of organisms comprising about 1.165 species developing in a variety of habitats; these include well-managed lawns and flower beds, moist places especially those on old wood and other plant material undergoing decomposition.The slime molds are also widespread on dung, and few representatives may also be restricted to this substratum.Another more recently recognized specialized niche is materialized by the dead branches attached to living trees.The major taxonomic treatises presently available on the slime moulds are those of Martin and Alexopoulos (1969), Alexopoulos (1973Alexopoulos ( , 1978) ) and Farr (1976).They are heterotrophic and most are decomposers that feed on dead plants and animals by endocytosis (Kendrick 2000).
The first written reference on Algeria myxomycetes date back to 1799 when René Desfontaines (1750-1833) reported in his Flora atlantica (Desfontaines 1799) Lycoperdon complanatum (= Lycoperdon bivalve Pers.).Nearly à half century later the first major contribution to the fungi of Algeria and its myxomycetous part was provided by Tulasne and Léveillé who authored the fungi section of the Cryptogamic volume of the Flore d'Algérie (Durieu de Maisonneuve 1846) and where they report 34 records of myxomycetes corresponding to nowadays 29 distinct and recognized taxa.
Since that it took almost 8 decades to see the publication by Maire, Patouillard and Pinoy (Maire et al. 1926) of the first publication dedicated exclusively to Algerian myxomycetes and where is reported 55 records of myxomycetous fungi corresponding to nowadays 47 distinct and recognized taxa.The second major and last contribution dedicated to Algerian myxomycetes was published four decades later by Faurel, Feldmann, Schotter (Faurel et al. 1964) who reported 73 records of myxomycetous fungi corresponding to 61 nowadays distinct and recognized taxa.
After this period it was necessary to wait until the works of Rojas and Stephenson (2010) and Djelloul (2014) to renew with the reporting of field observations of PFA in Algeria, thus constituting a good indicator at which extent the study of this group of organisms have been neglected.Although relatively recent regional (Lado 1994) or continental compilations (Ndiritu et al. 2009) give a good overview on the myxomycetes of Algeria we considered judicious to complete their list of taxa by records gathered from literature and herbarium specimen catalogues and to provide more details on their nomenclatural synonymy, substrate, distribution and abundance.
Checklists are important tools in taxonomy, systematics and conservation (Söderström et al. 2007(Söderström et al. , 2008; Moustafa and Abdel-Azeem 2011; Abdel-Azeem and Salem 2013; Nafady et al. 2016).In spite of that, several important areas lack recent checklists, including Algeria.This work aimed to close the gaps in knowledge on the fungi diversity of Algeria by providing a comprehensive checklist of protozoan fungal analogues.

Study area
Algeria, c. 2.4 million km 2 in area, is the largest country of Africa since the partition of Sudan in 2011.It is situated to the north of this continent, its entire northern coastline stretches for c. 1200 km along the southern boundary of the Mediterranean Sea, while inland it is delimited clockwise, along a boundaries totalling c. 6400 km, by Tunisia, Libya, Niger, Mali, Mauritania, Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic and Morocco.The country, which is mainly mountainous with an average altitude of 800 m, stretches from north to south (18°57'N to 37°08'N) to a distance of c. 2000 km and from west to east (08°39'W to 12°00'E) to a distance of c. 2100 km; the western parts of Algeria are only c. 160 km from the Atlantic Ocean.The Mediterranean coastline and the two major mountain ranges, the Tell Atlas and the Saharan Atlas, delimitates southwards three major topographic and climatic regions (1) the Tell, (2) the Hauts-Plateaux and (3) the Sahara (Fig. 1).
The Tell region, stretching only 80-190 km inland, includes the coastal strip and the Tell Atlas Mountains (Tellian Atlas) that consist of narrow coastal plains, hills and mountains.The annual precipitation ranges from semi-arid (400-600 mm) to moderately humid with an increasing gradient from west to east where some permanent wetland areas occur.Although this region represents only c. 4% of the Algerian territory, it includes 70% of the country's agricultural soils and hosts 65% of the population.The natural vegetation of this area is typically Mediterranean and many of the mountain slopes are covered with dense forest or scrub of mainly oaks (Quercus suber, Quercus ilex, Q. coccifera), junipers (Juniperus oxycedrus, J. thurifera J. phoenicea), aleppo pine (Pinus halepensis) and Atlas cedar (Cedrus atlantica).
The Hauts-Plateaux area is essentially a huge basin, c. 950 km in length, lying at an altitude of c. 1000 to 1400 m between the parallel mountains ranges of the Tell Atlas to the north and the Saharan Atlas to the south.This basin, which is 190 km at its widest point, includes a series of depressions running along a central south-west to north-east axis that support in some places shallow saline wetlands (Chotts and Sebkhas), which are seasonally flooded and become more saline as they gradually dry out.The region covers 13% of the country and hosts 26.5% of its population.The annual precipitation of the region is c.150-400 mm and agriculture is limited to the cultivation of salt-tolerant cereals; natural vegetation is represented mainly by steppes of Stipa tenacissima, Artemisia herba-alba and Lygeum spartum.
The Saharan area is essentially a vast arid to desertic area characterized by very little rainfall (< 100 mm per annum) and only ephemeral streams.The Sahara desert is not homogenous and takes on many forms.In the far north-west it consists of stony and gravely desertic high land known as the Hamada du Draâ.Eastwards, the southern slopes of the Saharian Atlas descend over a distance of c. 250 km to a central depression at an altitude of 200-500 m running south-west to north-east and filled by extensive ergs (vast sandy desertic areas with mobile dunes).In the centre of the region the land rises up to the stony plateau of Tademait, while further south it drops away into the Tidikelt depression that lies at an altitude of less than 200 m.Southwards and eastwards of this depression, the land rises again through a series of mountains of different heights, including Mount Tahat (ca.3000 m), the highest peak in Algeria.This mountainous area, with its deep canyons and high plateaux, delimitate the Hoggar-Tassili region that can be considered as a fourth topographic and climatic region of Algeria due to its situation that make it under the influence of the West African monsoon.The whole Saharan region covers 83% of the country, but hosts only 8.5% of its population in several oases developed from underground rivers or aquifers.Agriculture, in almost all cases limited to the oases, is based on the cultivation of the date palm and food crops.Natural vegetation cover is very scarce and represented mainly by highly adapted bushes and trees.

Data Collection
The species listed here were compiled from bibliographical, herbarium online database.A main list of Algerian PFA has been developed and the taxa are given in alphabetical sequence of orders, families and genera.The names of authors of fungal taxa are abbreviated according to Kirk and Ansell (1992) and Kirk et al. (2008).Species of each group were given in a taxonomic sequence and accepted names are highlighted in bold.The systematic arrangement in the present list follows the system of classification of Martin et al. (1983).Name corrections, authorities, and taxonomic assignments of all taxa reported in this work were checked against the databases nomen.eumycetozoa(http://eumycetozoa.com/data/index.php)(Lado (2005(Lado ( -2018) ) and Index fungorum (www.indexfungorum.org).

Result and Discussion
This survey based on the analysis of bibliographic sources and catalogs of herbaria holding Algerian fungal material allowed us to delineate 99 species of PFA that have been reported for Algeria (Tab.1).These species that belongs to 6 orders and 31 genera are dominated by Physarales (49 species) which represent circa 50% of all reported species.After Physarales, Trichiales (25 species), Stemonitales (14 species) and Liceales (8 species) appears as the two other main components of the Algerian PFA mycobiota while the two other order represented in Algeria Ceratoxyxiales and Echinosteliales and which are more less speciose are both represented by only one species each.This diversity is rather consistent since it represent respectively 1/4 of this reported for Meditteranean area by Lado (1994) and 1/3 of this reported for Africa by Ndiritu et al. (2009).
Almost of the AFP species reported for Algeria were reported from the Tell area where abundant precipitations and the presence of great number of forests are favorable to their implantation and persistence.Therefore five coprophilous PFA species were obtained in moist chamber from mammalian dung material (Dromedary, Hare, Gundi, Barbary Sheep) collected from the Saharan desert area.
The report in a relatively recent study done by Rojas and Stephenson (2010) and the presence in BR herbarium of several species of PFA that have not been yet reported in the literature as occurring in Algeria indicate that the country is seemingly poorly explored from the PFA point of view and almost certainly contains many other taxa yet to be discovered.We trust that this Checklist of Algerian PFA, will encourage scientists to investigate an important component of Algeria's biodiversity and to make it better known to the world's scientific community.

Table 1 -
Summary of the systematic distribution of the taxa of PFA reported for Algeria

of Algerian Protozoan Fungal Analogs Abbreviations used #Newly reported taxa: Taxa
preceded by # are new to Algeria.[HerbariaSpecimens]: The herbaria specimens cited are between square brackets with the corresponding collector name.