An online resource for marine fungi E. B. Gareth Jones 1,2 • Ka-Lai Pang 3 • Mohamed A. Abdel-Wahab 1,4 • Bettina Scholz 5 • Kevin D. Hyde 6 • Teun Boekhout 7,8 • Rainer Ebel 9 • Mostafa E. Rateb 10 • Linda Henderson 11 • Jariya Sakayaroj 12 • Satinee Suetrong 13 • Monika C. Dayarathne 6 • Vinit Kumar 6,17 • Seshagiri Raghukumar 14 • K. R. Sridhar 15 • Ali H. A. Bahkali 1 • Frank H. Gleason 16 • Chada Norphanphoun 6 Received: 3 January 2019 / Accepted: 20 April 2019 / Published online: 17 May 2019 Ó School of Science 2019 Abstract Index Fungorum, Species Fungorum and MycoBank are the key fungal nomenclature and taxonomic databases that can be sourced to find taxonomic details concerning fungi, while DNA sequence data can be sourced from the NCBI, EBI and UNITE databases. Nomenclature and ecological data on freshwater fungi can be accessed on http://fungi.life.illinois.edu/, while http://www.marinespecies.org/provides a comprehensive list of names of marine organisms, including information on their synonymy. Previous websites however have little information on marine fungi and their ecology, beside articles that deal with marine fungi, especially those published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may not be accessible to those working in third world countries. To address this problem, a new website www.marinefungi.org was set up and is introduced in this paper. This website provides a search facility to genera of marine fungi, full species descriptions, key to species and illustrations, an up to date classification of all recorded marine fungi which includes all fungal groups (Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Blastocladiomycota, Chytridiomycota, Mucoromycota and fungus-like organisms e.g. Thraustochytriales), and listing recent publications. Currently, 1257 species are listed in the marine fungi website (www. marinefungi.org), in 539 genera, 74 orders, 168 families, 20 classes and five phyla, with new taxa continuing to be described. The website has curators with specialist mycological expertise who help to provide update data on the clas- sification of marine fungi. This article also reviews knowledge of marine fungi covering a wide range of topics: their higher classification, ecology and world distribution, role in energy transfer in the oceans, origin and new chemical structures. An updated classification of marine fungi is also included. We would like to invite all mycologists to contribute to this innovative website. Keywords Fungal classification Á marine fungi website Á High-throughput sequencing techniques Á Fungal diversity Á Origin of marine fungi Introduction Marine fungi have been studied since the first record of the species Sphaeria posidoniae (= Halotthia posidoniae) on the rhizome of the sea grass Posidonia oceanica in Algeria by Durieu and Montagne (in Montagne 1856), but as yet there has been no webpage to accommodate all of the information on these organisms. This review introduces the website, www.marinefungi.org which has been developed to provide an up-to-date compendium on marine fungi. There have been various definitions as to what a marine fungus is, the generally quoted one is by Kohlmeyer and Kohlmeyer (1979): ‘‘obligate marine fungi are those that grow and sporulate exclusively in a marine or estuarine habitat’’. Jones et al. (2015) broadened this as they were of the opinion it was too narrow and they included marine derived fungi, as many are taxa isolated during bio- prospecting for new secondary metabolites (Fenical and Jensen 1993; Fenical et al. 1998). Marine derived fungi are & Mohamed A. Abdel-Wahab mohamed.eisa@science.sohag.edu.eg Rainer Ebel r.ebel@abdn.ac.uk Mostafa E. Rateb Mostafa.Rateb@uws.ac.uk Extended author information available on the last page of the article 123 Fungal Diversity (2019) 96:347–433 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13225-019-00426-5