The Arctic will be strongly affected by climate change. In Svalbard the coal mining industry were established in the early 20th century. All man-made structures and sites dating before 1946 in Svalbard are protected by law and considered as cultural heritage. This included the massive cable car trestles that are constructed from untreated Norway spruce and mounted directly into the soil. We hereby present preliminary results characterising fungal decay from six of the cable car trestles from Longyearbyen, Svalbard. As expected, we found that that age alone was a poor indicator of decay risk and that more severe decay was found in soil contact than above ground. A total of 170 fungal species were identified, including basidiomycetes, ascomycetes, lichens, moulds, and yeasts. A low number of the species were wood decaying fungi and only three wood decay species and three mould species overlapped with previous studies from Svalbard. The reason is hypothesized to be the variations in sampling and analytic techniques

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