About This Project

Of an estimated 3.2 million species of fungi, only some 120,000 are known to science. Most of the undescribed species reside in the tropics. In 2014, myself and a fellow mycologist, Roo Vandegrift, collected some 350 samples of fungi from Reserva Los Cedros; one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of the Andes. We are now looking to begin the microscopic and molecular analysis portions of our research, with the goal of publishing on our findings.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Of the conservatively estimated 3.2 million species of fungi on Earth, only some 120,000 have been described (1). The vast majority of the undescribed species are widely considered to reside in the tropics (1)(2)(3). Of those tropical areas, the one which has been subject to the least mycological exploration is the Andean-Amazonian region, where famously biodiverse countries like Bolivia have only some 800 fungal records (4). By comparison, the species of fungi reported from the significantly less diverse the British Isles number around 13,000 (4). There is a comparable disparity in expected diversity and the number of published species in Ecuador (5).

What is the significance of this project?

As climate change, resource extraction, corruption and political volatility further threaten already critically endangered habitats across the world, it is incumbent upon biodiversity researchers to document, preserve, and study as much as possible while they can. Reserva Los Cedros — one of the last unlogged watersheds on the western slope of the Andes — was chosen as the collection site for this project, which we visited in 2014. The reserve has since been declared a mining concession by the Ecuadorian government and is slated for destruction. The identification and description of rare or endemic species from the reserve will help demonstrate the value of these habitats and the importance of their conservation.

What are the goals of the project?

I will be spending the month of January at the University of Oregon as a visiting researcher. During that time, I will be both recording microscopic features and preparing tissue samples for sequencing at an off-site location. The final combination of microcharacters, ITS sequences, macro photography, and field notes will be sufficient to begin to publish on the mycological diversity of the Los Cedros Reserve as it compares to the rest of Ecuador, the Andes, South America and the world at large. All of our data so far (notes and photographs) have been made freely available at the citizen science website, Mushroom Observer (6)(7), which will be periodically updated with new information as our work progresses.