The Dutch Mycological Society

The Dutch Mycological Society was set up in 1908 and the object of the Society is to promote the study and understanding of fungi. This is done by organising meetings and field excursions, and by publication of the Society's journal, Coolia. The Society has a number of Committees, of which the Committee for Fungi and Nature Conservation deals with all aspects of conservation of fungi and nature management.

Apart from the yearly meeting in which all matters concerning the organisation of the Society are discussed, two general days with lectures are organised each year: one with a special theme organised by the Scientific Committee and a more general one organised by the Society itself. These meetings are very well attended, and at the general meeting in January it is often the case that 170 of the approximately 500 members attend.

In the mushroom season at least every weekend and often also during the week field excursions are organised for members. Every year two week-long forays are organised, one inland and one abroad. A good policy concerning conservation of fungi is impossible without knowledge of their distribution. Therefore, we will first briefly discuss the activities of the Dutch Mycological Society in the study of fungal distribution.

Distribution of fungi: recording

The Society is very active in gathering information about the distribution of fungi in The Netherlands. From its early days, the Dutch mycologist Frencken kept lists of records of field excursions.

Introduction

For rather more than a year, the specialist group for fungi within the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been revived after interruption in its activities between 1995 and 1998. As a member of the European Council for the Conservation of Fungi (ECCF) standing committee, I shared with my ECCF colleagues the regret that fungi were no longer taken into account within the IUCN. So we decided to take advantage of the June 1998 Planta Europa meeting, in Uppsala, to establish new contacts with the IUCN and to revive this specialist group.

Within the new specialist group for fungi, the ECCF serves as the main framework since it has accumulated much data and experience on the topic since 1984. But I am also trying to federate further mycologists involved in conservation outside Europe so that the group will consist of a genuinely enlarged and international network.

In this chapter I will give a brief description of the present global state of knowledge concerning fungal conservation and indicate the main priorities we should consider for the future. Of course, this owes a great deal to the ECCF heritage, especially through the decisive contributions from some of its members, such as Eef Arnolds and others. I also received feedback from some members of the new group but I do not claim that the literature survey is in any way exhaustive and I do realise that some points may not be represented here.

Introduction

During the 9th Congress of European Mycologists in Oslo, 1985, quantitative data were presented for the first time on changes in the mycota, in particular in The Netherlands (Arnolds, 1988). These data supported the fears of many mycologists and naturalists, namely that macrofungi were decreasing, at least some species in some areas. This information was the motive for the establishment of the European Committee for Protection of Fungi, which later changed its name into the European Council for Conservation of Fungi (ECCF). In this chapter I will review the developments in fungus conservation in Europe during the past 15 years and look forward towards challenges in the future. I restrict myself to macrofungi since microfungi are rarely considered in relation to conservation (but see Chapter 17).

Effective conservation of fungi depends on the compilation and integration of data from different disciplines, here summarised in the scheme shown in Fig. 4.1. Central in this scheme are Red Data lists because they reflect our knowledge on the status of fungal species and are meant as a basis for measurements and to present our conclusions to a wider audience. Obviously, progress in conservation depends on progress in other mycological disciplines, such as taxonomy, distribution and ecology. Therefore I shall pay some attention to these disciplines as well.

Generally speaking, Division 7 comprises that half of the Asiatic continent which is for the most part boreal, cool-temperate, semi-arid or arid; in other words, it is largely beyond the influence of the summer monsoon.

Definition and scope of the work

The aim of the present work, a revised and expanded version of that first published in 1984, is to furnish in bibliographic form a geographically arranged one-volume guide to the most useful nominally complete floras, checklists and related works dealing with the vascular plants of the world. Also included are concise historically oriented reviews of the state of floristic knowledge in different parts of the world, geographical conspectuses, and references to local and general bibliographies and indices. The work attempts as far as possible to account for titles up through 1999 that fall within its scope. The sequence of geographical units is, with slight modifications, that devised for the first edition.

In contrast to Geographical guide to floras of the world by Sidney F. Blake and Alice C. Atwood (vol. 1, 1942; vol. 2 by Blake alone, 1961) only one to a few ‘standard’ works are listed for each recognized geographical unit.

Introductory remarks

The following paragraphs are intended to serve as a background to an annotated enumeration of the principal general retrospective botanical bibliographies, indices and abstracting journals in print, as well as printed library catalogues most likely to be consulted in a search for floristic literature references – particularly in areas not effectively covered by regional source bibliographies and indices. Not included here are general taxonomic works, as these have been dealt with under Division 0 and moreover are described in greater or lesser detail in standard textbooks and other introductory accounts.

Records of floristic literature

With the movement of the last decade or so towards widespread use of on-line bibliographic search tools, it may properly be asked: why concern oneself with traditional print? The researcher primarily concerned with the description or analysis of structures and processes would by now probably find most, if not all, of his sources through computerized databases as well as by following citation trails from article to article. Relatively few sources would in the end be more than, say, 10 years old, and recourse to those bibliographies and indices (or parts thereof) available purely in print would rarely be necessary. On the other hand, floristic botany is not only spatially but also historically based, as is the literature of record in natural history, ethnobiology, uses of biota, evolution, and biodiversity in general. Most on-line bibliographic databases do not at present go back earlier than the late 1960s (with fulltext journals first appearing in the 1990s), and as yet there has not been a general movement in biology for retrospective conversion of indices, monographic bibliographies, or full texts even of the more important journals.

Introduction

The Scottish Wild Mushroom Forum was developed in response to the rapid growth of interest in harvesting wild mushrooms. Both picking for the pot and commercial harvesting are popular and bring people back into the countryside in an enjoyable and sometimes profitable way. The commercial industry, which has developed in the last fifteen years, involves five principal companies and up to 400 casual harvesters. Commercial harvesting is fairly important as it provides an additional source of income for rural communities.

Until recently there has been little mushroom harvesting in Scotland, and the traditions and widespread knowledge that exist on the Continent have not had time to develop. The Forum sees the enjoyment that people gain from harvesting mushrooms as an opportunity for positive action, and seeks to involve harvesters in the creation of a voluntary Code of Practice. As well as producing a Code, the Forum will seek to implement it in ways that will reach the largest audience. By involving people in the management of the resource that they use, the Forum intends to build a culture of sustainable harvesting.

Grants from Scottish Natural Heritage and Moray Badenoch and Strathspey Enterprise fund the Forum, together with a Millennium Award from the Millennium Forest for Scotland Trust.

The process

The groups involved in the harvest of wild fungi were identified during an earlier study (Dyke & Newton, 1999) and are shown in Table 19.1. Contact was made with these groups.

Introduction

Until recently, nature conservation in The Netherlands has focused on the protection of plants and birds; management plans for nature reserves contain no measures aiming at maintenance or improvement of the mycota. The reasons for this were mainly practical: although a great deal is known about the distribution, ecology and management of higher plants and birds, there is hardly any knowledge concerning fungi. However, site management that is good for birds and higher plants is not necessarily beneficial for other groups of organisms, such as insects or fungi. Moreover, sites with valuable vegetation are not necessarily rich in fungi, and sites with an abundance of very rare fungi can occur among vegetation of little interest.

Since the Dutch Mycological Society started a project for the recording of macrofungi in 1980, much more information about the distribution and ecological preferences of fungi has become available. The Dutch Mycological Society's database now contains more than a million records. However, the data are not of direct use to managers of nature reserves. The data must be filtered and interpreted to be of practical value.

In an attempt to raise interest in mycota in conservation management plans the Dutch Mycological Society organised a meeting entitled ‘Fungi and Nature Conservation, Implications for Management’ in 1993, to which nature managers were also invited (Kuyper, 1994).

Introduction

The vast forests of the Pacific Northwest region of the United States, an area outlined by the states of Oregon, Washington, and Idaho, are well known for their rich diversity of macrofungi. The forests are dominated by trees in the Pinaceae with about 20 species in the genera Abies, Larix, Picea, Pinus, Pseudotsuga, and Tsuga. All form ectomycorrhizas with fungi in the Basidiomycota, Ascomycota, and a few Zygomycota. Other ectomycorrhizal genera include Alnus, Arbutus, Arctostaphylos, Castinopsis, Corylus, Lithocarpus, Populus, Quercus, and Salix, often occurring as understorey or early-successional trees. Ectomycorrhizal fungi number in the thousands; as many as 2000 species associate with widespread dominant trees such as Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) (Trappe, 1977). The Pacific Northwest region also contains various ecozones on diverse soil types that range from extremely wet coastal forests to xeric interior forests, found at elevations from sea level to timber line at 2000 to 3000 metres. The combination of diverse ectomycorrhizal host trees inhabiting steep environmental and physical gradients has yielded perhaps the richest forest mycota of any temperate forest zone. When the large number of ectomycorrhizal species is added to the diverse array of saprotrophic and pathogenic fungi, the overall diversity of macrofungi becomes truly staggering.

Issues relating to conservation and management of forest fungi in the Pacific Northwest must be placed in the context of public land resources and Federal laws regulating forest management.

Introduction

Wild mushrooms have been praised by Roman and Chinese emperors alike while providing an important everyday food source for rural people around the world. But in America and other English-speaking countries, a deep and exaggerated distrust of mushrooms has denied them a cherished place at the dinner table. As Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out (Gould, 1997), this prejudice is expressed even in our everyday language: urban crime and taxes are said to ‘mushroom’ while prosperity and the arts ‘flower’!

Until recently very few Americans dared to eat wild mushrooms, and even fewer picked them. But in the 1980s, rising demand in the wealthier mushroom-loving countries caused them to look abroad for new sources of wild mushrooms. At the same time, Americans’ palates grew bolder and more sophisticated. Entrepreneurs rushed in to fill the rapidly growing demand for gourmet foods, and out-of-work rural Americans and recent immigrants (particularly from southeast Asia) saw picking wild mushrooms as a chance to make a decent living in a familiar environment, the forest, while maintaining a measure of personal dignity and cultural autonomy.

Thousands of people in the Pacific Northwest now pick and sell wild mushrooms. Most of them pick locally or opportunistically for a little extra cash or as one of several seasonally based strategies for survival.

Introduction and general considerations

The preparation and publication of floras and related works has been a constant feature of systematic botany since late in the sixteenth century. In that time, this activity in a formal sense has spread from central and western Europe to other parts of the world. In some cases, however – and particularly in eastern Asia – it absorbed, and was to an extent influenced by, autochthonous floristic traditions. At different times – and particularly in the twentieth century – floristic work has prevailed over other approaches to plant diversity. This trend, first noted in 1959 by Stafleu and later by Thorne and Gómez-Pompa, was affirmed in an extensive review by Jäger in the late 1970s. From the 1980s, floristics (and its products) have received renewed emphasis from conservation and biodiversity interests, and the scope, strengths and weaknesses of floras have been analyzed in symposia and individual articles.