Sporidesmium Link, Mag. Gesell. naturf. Freunde, Berlin 3(1–2): 41 (1809)

MycoBank number: MB 10024; Index Fungorum number: IF 10024; Facesoffungi number: FoF 01750; 188 morphological species (Species Fungorum 2020), 17 species with sequence data.

Type species – Sporidesmium atrum Link

Notes – Sporidesmium is a large and heterogeneous genus. To date, 383 epithets are referred to the genus (Index Fungorum 2020). However, many previously described species were revised and transferred to over 30 genera (Iturriaga et al. 2008). Studies based on phylogenetic analysis have been carried out to further re-examine the classification of sporidesmium-like taxa, given that the generic delimitations based on morphology data appear to be questionable. Sporidesmium and morphologically similar genera are clearly not monophyletic, as they are distributed among different families and orders in Dothideomycetes and Sordariomycetes (Shenoy et al. 2006, Su et al. 2016b, Yang et al. 2017). Sporidesmium was an asexual genus until Zhang et al. (2017a) introduced a sexual morph species Sporidesmium thailandense which is collected from freshwater habitat in Thailand. In this entry, we introduce a new species Sporidesmium dulongense based on morphology and phylogeny. It was collected from a freshwater river in northwestern Yunnan Province, China.

Species