FUNDIS June 2023 Newsletter
Letter from the Director
Dear fungal friends,
Those of us at FUNDIS are excited with the progress of what we've been working on: over 2,650 mushrooms collected as a part of our state-wide fungal conservation model CA FUNDIS from 18 amazing collectors, the preparation of our third Rare Fungi Challenge, our first fundraiser dinner at the Telluride Mushroom Festival, and a few other surprises we are looking forward to unveil (yes that is meant to be a mushroom joke!). Please enjoy the stories in this newsletter that dive further into our recent discoveries and community moments.
Are you a part of our 215 FUNDIS Local Projects? We are asking our Local Projects Leaders to fill out an Engagement Form so we can update our projects and gather more information from our community science network about successes, challenges, number of regular participants, etc. If you are a FUNDIS Local Project Leader, please be on the lookout for correspondence from our valiant volunteer, Kristin Cohea at conservation@fundis.org with a link to the Form. Thank you for updating us with your important work! A true picture of fungal biodiversity is accumulated over many years of observation and documentation.
As always, please consider donating to our mission or becoming a paid subscriber to our Funga Decoded Newsletter Substack. A deep thank you to those who are monthly or annual supporters! You are helping protect fungi.
- Gabriela D'Elia
FUNDIS Director
Sequencing Update
As our collection team has been busy filling their baskets with California’s unique bounty of spring snowmelt fungi, the sequencing team has been busy validating the data from winter’s quarry. As of writing we have added 120 sequences to our iNaturalist.org project with another 250 or so in the pipeline. To see all of our sequenced collections, you can follow the custom iNaturalist URL here:
We have made some interesting discoveries including two potentially novel species of Mycena collected on public land in the picturesque Oak-Pine-Manzanita savannah of Lake County, a region rarely sampled for fungi. One of these species has no sequence matches to anything collected so far, and may be endemic to this habitat. The other species matches sequences recently generated by our collections lead Christian Schwarz from a recent trip to Santa Cruz Island. The really interesting part is that the specimens collected on Santa Cruz island were found growing in the litter in a Lyonothamnus floribundus (Island Ironwood) forest, a species of tree endemic to the Channel Islands. More work, including microscopy and additional sequencing will be necessary to determine the novelty of these finds and generate an official species description for them. What biogeographical story could connect these two seemingly unrelated places hundreds of miles away from each other? These and many other stories are waiting to be told, their prose written in DNA letters and carefully translated by our sequencing team.
Parallel to our sequencing project through the Canadian Centre for DNA Barcoding, we have been putting the finishing touches on our in-house DNA sequencing pipeline featuring Oxford Nanopore Technologies (ONT) MinION sequencing platform. This revolutionary 3rd-generation sequencing technology uses specially designed proteins embedded in a membrane to read changes in electrical signal as individual DNA strands pass from one side of the membrane to the other side through the protein pore. The sequencing device itself is less than half the size of a typical smartphone and can be plugged into a laptop and run in the field. Proportional to the size is the cost, whereas a typical sequencer can range from the size of a large printer to the size of a refrigerator and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, the MinION sequencing platform starts out at just $1000. The entire materials budget to begin sequencing fungal DNA barcodes is low enough that this technology is accessible to individuals and smaller organizations with a minimal need for lab space and equipment. In fact, one of FUNDIS’s founders (back when we were the North American Mycoflora Project) Steve Russell has already generated around ten thousand sequences using this platform.
Adopting this technology will allow us to process between 480 and 960 specimens at a time and at a significantly reduced cost compared to traditional Sanger sequencing. We are still testing, optimizing, and validating this technology for our CA FUNDIS project, but things are looking good for a full rollout in the near future.
Harte Singer
FUNDIS Sequencing Lead
Memorial Day Weekend at Mt. Shasta
California FUNDIS Collectors and Volunteers from across the state gathered at a free camping event near Mt. Shasta on Memorial Day Weekend, with the goal of collecting fungi together as a large group. Hundreds of beautiful west coast mycophiles turned out for this event, that has been a yearly tradition for the greater part of the last two decades. The 2023 campout was a beautiful continuation of the custom, with CA FUNDIS representatives in full effect! Rudy Diaz, Stu Pickell, Alan Rockefeller, Warren Cardimona, Mandy Hackney, Mandie Quark, Dean Lyons, Thea Chesney, Bat Vardeh, and Michelle Torres-Grant and we cannot forget to mention the amazing Volunteers Damon Tighe and Kingston (@someonekingston).
Rumor has it, typically there are morels and porcini fruiting across the area on Memorial Day weekend. However, record snowfall this winter meant that we were too early for most of the edible mushrooms to make an appearance. Yet many other species unique to the snowmelt ecology were present in large numbers, so FUNDIS Collectors had a legitimate field day! In addition to almost the entire Collections Team, Sequencing Lead Harte Singer trained new Volunteers so that the maximum number of fungi could be collected over the weekend. It was truly amazing to see so many knowledgeable and helpful humans show up for the fungi!
FUNDIS Biodiversity Database Statistics
The FUNDIS Biodiversity Database on iNaturalist is a collection of high-quality observations made by community scientists across North America. Please consider contributing! Your finds can then be used to better understand and protect fungi.
Habitat, distribution, and abundance data are critical pieces of information for assessing the threat status of a species. Knowing which species are threatened enables the conservationists to prioritize efforts and redistribute resources.
Every single day fungi are posted as observations on iNaturalist and Mushroom Observer, but the quality, and thus utility, of this data may vary greatly. The FUNDIS Biodiversity Database contains the high-quality metadata that is necessary for evaluating the status of North American macrofungi, and therefore remains an importance source of observational data points.
What’s in it for you? By contributing to the FUNDIS Biodiversity Database you are contributing to a worthwhile cause. If you don’t know the name of your find, that’s ok. We have expert identifiers working to identify and give feedback on all observations, making them even more valuable, to both you and us.
Thank you to all of the community scientists who continue to contribute!