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One of the main threats to forests in the Anthropocene are novel or altered interactions among trees, insects and fungi. To critically assess the contemporary research on bark beetles, their associated fungi, and their relationships with trees, the international Bark Beetle Mycobiome research coordination network has been formed. The network comprises 22 researchers from 17 institutions. This forward-looking review summarizes the group’s assessment of the current status of the bark beetle mycobiome research field and priorities for its advancement. Priorities include data mobility and standards, the adoption of new technologies for the study of these symbioses, reconciliation of conflicting paradigms, and practices for robust inference of symbiosis and tree epidemiology. The Net work proposes contemporary communication strategies to interact with the global community of researchers studying symbioses and natural resource managers. We conclude with a call to the broader scientific community to participate in the network and contribute their perspectives. 

ABSTRACT Fungi play many essential roles in ecosystems. They facilitate plant access to nutrients and water, serve as decay agents that cycle carbon and nutrients through the soil, water and atmosphere, and are major regulators of macro‐organismal populations. Although technological advances are improving the detection and identification of fungi, there still exist key gaps in our ecological knowledge of this kingdom, especially related to function.Trait‐based approaches have been instrumental in strengthening our understanding of plant functional ecology and, as such, provide excellent models for deepening our understanding of fungal functional ecology in ways that complement insights gained from traditional and ‐omics‐based techniques. In this review, we synthesize current knowledge of fungal functional ecology, taxonomy and systematics and introduce a novel database of fungal functional traits (Fun^Fun). Fun^Funis built to interface with other databases to explore and predict how fungal functional diversity varies by taxonomy, guild, and other evolutionary or ecological grouping variables. To highlight how a quantitative trait‐based approach can provide new insights, we describe multiple targeted examples and end by suggesting next steps in the rapidly growing field of fungal functional ecology.