Edit A
di or's Letter
re we loving our mushroom habitats to death? It seems everywhere I turn, mushrooms
and other fungi are in the media. Fungi are cool all of a sudden! And everyone, it seems, is getting interested in foraging in the woods for wild edible mushrooms. Not everyone is thrilled of course; some veteran mycophiles are bemoaning the throngs of foragers trampling “their” once secret woods and hoovering up all “their” mushroom patches. In this special edition of FUNGI we offer perspectives on this topic. We also take on some of the bigger, more urgent issues too. We humans have come to a crucial
point in our history. About 2.5 billion people inhabited our planet when I was born. In the early 1990s, when I was a graduate student studying mushrooms and other fungi, our population had increased to 5.3 billion. Now it is 7.8 billion and is projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050. Tese figures illustrate the immense challenges we face when tackling global climate change and figuring out how, as a species, to sustain the healthy ecosystems that we depend upon for our existence. Fungi will play an important role. Sustaining a healthy planet depends
on keeping ecosystems—especially forests—intact and healthy. Tis is of
FUngi PO Box 98
Batavia, Illinois 60510-9998, USA
E-mail:
fungimag@gmail.com Web site:
www.fungimag.com (262) 227-1243
PUBLISHER
& EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Britt A. Bunyard
DESIGN/PRODUCTION Jan Hammond
2 FUNGI Volume 14:4 Fall 2021
ditor's Letter
vital importance to all people around the globe. Arguably, humans have collected, used and eaten mushrooms and other fungi for as long as we have been human, and it’s likely that our predecessors did as well. Complex cultural traditions have been documented in historical times. Currently, wild forest mushrooms are harvested on every continent (except Antarctica, of course). Some forest fungi are harvested for medicinal use. Others are decomposers, thus they can be cultivated with relative ease. Te most abundant edible mushrooms are ectomycorrhizal. Mutualistically interacting with tree roots, these species have sufficient on-going supplies of nutrition from their tree hosts to support abundant annual fruiting. Forests around the world, however, are under tremendous pressure for other uses and deforestation or degraded forest ecosystems often result. Global climate change, the ever-
present threat of wildfires, and pollution are issues that the entire world is having to come to terms with. Believe it or not, fungi may play a part in solving some of these problems and we highlight them in this special edition, I hope you enjoy it.
On a happier note, in 2021 we celebrate the 200th
the publication of Elias Magnus anniversary of
Fries’s Volume 1 of his Systema Mycologicum which is the most important work of mycological literature. For most groups of fungi, this book was long considered the starting point for valid taxonomic names (though the rules have been relaxed to match those for plants; the starting date now for accepted names begins with Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753). Happy birthday Mycology!
CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS Aaron Birk
Mary Schaefer Brink
Aaron “Inkling” Cruz Garcia Talia Hudgins
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS Denis Benjamin Michael Beug Alan R. Biggs
William Padilla Brown Susan Goldhor Art Goodtimes Edward Matisoff
Lawrence Millman Tobiah Moshier
Robert Dale Rogers David Rose
Mark Spear
Krista Towns Steve Trudell
Else C. Vellinga Michael Wood
EDITORIAL REVIEW Cathy Cripps
Montana State University Harold W. Keller
Te Botanical Research Institute of Texas
Patrick Leacock Te Field Museum of Natural History Chicago, Illinois
Lawrence M. Leonard, M.D. Portland, Maine
Michael Nicholson
Oxnard College, California David Pilz
PilzWald-Forestry
Applications of Mycology Corvallis, Oregon
Bruch Reed Illinois Mycological Association
North American Mycological Association Paul Stamets
Fungi Perfecti Steve Trudell
University of Washington, Seattle Else C. Vellinga
Berkeley, California Andrus Voitk
Foray Newfoundland & Labrador Corner Brook, Newfoundland
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