Saving The Forgotten Kingdom - A Strategy to conserve the UK's fungi launcehd by Pla

[Andy Overall]

Thought you'd all like to see this, if some of you haven't already seen it. A fungi conservation strategy spearheaded by Plantlife together with the BMS, Natural England and other bodies. A positive move I believe.

http://www.britmycolsoc.org.uk/files...ngdomPlantlife.




Andy Overall
Group Leader
London Fungus Group
BMS aff.

[KeenTeen17]

mines just coming up with page not found

[FungiJohn]

Try here:

http://www.plantlife.org.uk/portal/a...20Jan%2009.pdf

[Andy Overall]

Originally Posted by KeenTeen17

mines just coming up with page not found

If you are interested in seeing the strategy in more depth eg. the publication; contact, joanna.bromley@plantlife.org.uk and she will email you a copy. Sorry about the url don't know what happened there?

Andy

[PeteS]

There was an article on the BBC website in the middle of January:

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | UK fungi get protection strategy

I find this comment interesting:

"It shocks me that we are still unsure whether the presence of a fruiting body signifies that the organism is healthy or if it is under stress."

It's something that I've thought about.

[mollisia]

Hallo,

All this sounds so nice and good and it's such a fantastic idea to develop a strategy to conserve the fungi and so on ....
But any ideas how this should work in reality? Our micorhizal fungi suffer in very first point from the nitrification of the soil, coming through the air. More and more agriculture etc. etc. The soil in a normal forest has the same amount of N (Stickstoff, don't know the english word for it) that had an agricultured field in the middle of the 60s! And it is going on and on. What will you do to protect all the Phlegmacia, Bolets, Russulas, Tricholomas etc.? Build a roof over their forest? Look at forest in the vicinity of agricultered land and you can see from which side the wind blows: It's that side were nettles, elder and such nitrophil species go hundred meters deep into the forest! Our fungi from bogs and wet areas suffer from a dramatical decline of moors, bogs and such kind of biotops. Especially the "flat moors" (does this expression exist? I mean moors which are built by a high level of ground water) are in the areas I lived up to now nearly extinct. In the Saale valley between Saalfeld and Jena (appr. 40 kilometers) there have been 300 such moores 200 years ago. Now there is 1 ("one") tiny rest, completely overgrown by Carex acutiformis and lying between two houses in a village. Area appr. 10 x 20 meters It is evident, that we have lost something around 90% of our moors and wet lands in the last 2 centuries. And drying out those areas still continues, and the ground water level is set deeper and deeper to built industrial area here and there!
This are only two examples. Too many valuable area get lost and there is no substitute for them.

The other thing is, what will one do to keep a certain locality with interesting fungi in the state as it is? I have the feeling, that micorhizal fungis diversity declines in a certain state of forest age. But that is at first not proofen generally and at second only judged from the fruitbodies we see. So will you try to keep that interesting forest in the age that it is? Probably best would be to care for that all stages of tree age are present, but you still have the negative effect of what is coming in by rain.

Sorry if I play the bad boy, but in my eyes those projects are only nice eyecatchers and welcome opportunity to wash ones hand "oh, we have done what we can" and this kind.
Politicians have to spend money in projects which handle with taxonomy, which gives us results in how certain species live and what they exactly need, in projects that detect the biodiversity in the country first of all! We don't even know how much species we have, we don't know in quite many cases how to delimite one from the other, we don't know why they live here and not there, but we want to protect them? Sounds not very serious to me!

We need the knowledge we have e.g. with the orchids, were we kno exactly how to handle a certain biotop to keep the orchis vital. Which times and how often the gras has to be removed, how shady the area may become without affections to the population, and all this kind of things. We have no idea about the exact life circumstance of the very very most of those fungi we want to protect. How should this work?

best regards,
Andreas

[FungiJohn]

Originally Posted by mollisia

Hallo,

All this sounds so nice and good and it's such a fantastic idea to develop a strategy to conserve the fungi and so on ....
But any ideas how this should work in reality? Our micorhizal fungi suffer in very first point from the nitrification of the soil, coming through the air. More and more agriculture etc. etc. The soil in a normal forest has the same amount of N (Stickstoff, don't know the english word for it) that had an agricultured field in the middle of the 60s! And it is going on and on. What will you do to protect all the Phlegmacia, Bolets, Russulas, Tricholomas etc.? Build a roof over their forest? Look at forest in the vicinity of agricultered land and you can see from which side the wind blows: It's that side were nettles, elder and such nitrophil species go hundred meters deep into the forest! Our fungi from bogs and wet areas suffer from a dramatical decline of moors, bogs and such kind of biotops. Especially the "flat moors" (does this expression exist? I mean moors which are built by a high level of ground water) are in the areas I lived up to now nearly extinct. In the Saale valley between Saalfeld and Jena (appr. 40 kilometers) there have been 300 such moores 200 years ago. Now there is 1 ("one") tiny rest, completely overgrown by Carex acutiformis and lying between two houses in a village. Area appr. 10 x 20 meters It is evident, that we have lost something around 90% of our moors and wet lands in the last 2 centuries. And drying out those areas still continues, and the ground water level is set deeper and deeper to built industrial area here and there!
This are only two examples. Too many valuable area get lost and there is no substitute for them.

The other thing is, what will one do to keep a certain locality with interesting fungi in the state as it is? I have the feeling, that micorhizal fungis diversity declines in a certain state of forest age. But that is at first not proofen generally and at second only judged from the fruitbodies we see. So will you try to keep that interesting forest in the age that it is? Probably best would be to care for that all stages of tree age are present, but you still have the negative effect of what is coming in by rain.

Sorry if I play the bad boy, but in my eyes those projects are only nice eyecatchers and welcome opportunity to wash ones hand "oh, we have done what we can" and this kind.
Politicians have to spend money in projects which handle with taxonomy, which gives us results in how certain species live and what they exactly need, in projects that detect the biodiversity in the country first of all! We don't even know how much species we have, we don't know in quite many cases how to delimite one from the other, we don't know why they live here and not there, but we want to protect them? Sounds not very serious to me!

best regards,
Andreas

Some interesting valid points and food for thought Andreas

John

[mollisia]

Hallo,

just a remark on my posting:
When I read it now, it has a touch of resignation and of "we can't do anything anyway, so let's do nothing".
This is not my intention, absolutely not!

But I want to draw the attention to the topics where really our fungal diversity gets lost and that a reservate here and another there is only a drop on a hot stone, really! But that doesn't mean that those drop were not welcome! It all is better than nothing, but this won't safe many fungi species, I'm sure of that.

best regards,
Andreas

[FungiJohn]

Originally Posted by mollisia

Hallo,

just a remark on my posting:
When I read it now, it has a touch of resignation and of "we can't do anything anyway, so let's do nothing".
This is not my intention, absolutely not!

But I want to draw the attention to the topics where really our fungal diversity gets lost and that a reservate here and another there is only a drop on a hot stone, really! But that doesn't mean that those drop were not welcome! It all is better than nothing, but this won't safe many fungi species, I'm sure of that.

best regards,
Andreas

I fully understood your intention Andreas.

I would regard it maybe as a start of hopefully something bigger and with more meat on the bones!

John

[Mushroomman]

The thing fungi need protection from is the weather in britain , when you think it cant get any worse... It does!