The majority of trichomycete species have been described from southern Europe
and the United States, which merely reflects the location of biologists who
have studied them. A systematic survey of any large land mass, and perhaps most
islands with a suitable arthropod fauna, would reveal representatives of these
fungi. Some species of trichomycetes, in fact, are known to have a much wider
geographic range than the distribution of any single species of hosts which
they inhabit, owing to the fact that many of the fungi are not strictly species
specific and can infest other host species with different distributions (see
Chapter 6). Some trichomycetes have a very limited
known geographic range, but at the present time it cannot be said whether this
is the actual situation or is due merely to insufficient information.
The known worldwide distribution of trichomycetes, in addition to North America and Europe, includes all continents except Antarctica (Fig. 13.1). We have deficient knowledge of the mycota of vast areas of Canada, Asia, Africa, and South America. Most field work has been carried out in temperate zones of the world. Tropical trichomycetes have been investigated in Costa Rica (Lichtwardt, 1994, 1997, 2000), and to a lesser extent in Puerto Rico and other regions of the Neotropics, northern Queensland, Australia (Lichtwardt and Williams, 1990), and other scattered reports that have been summarized by White et al. (2000).
In Chapter 11 distributions of individual species are provided, and Chapter 13 is an assesment of trichomycete biogeography.