The North American Mycoflora project - the first steps on a long journey.

Where would plant ecology and evolution be without the basic knowledge of plant species and distributions? Fortunately we do not need to answer this question because floristics is a mature field, and published floras deliver essential tools for plant ecologists who need to identify species or use plant distribution data for conservation and biogeographic work. By contrast, fungal biologists seldom have the equivalent knowledge, as there are relatively few published mycofloras (fungas, mycobiotas or mycotas). The mycofloras that do exist are necessarily limited to macrofungi, essentially mushrooms, but even with this delimitation the task of assembling a mycoflora is daunting. This is because the number of species is large (Mueller et al., 2007), the fruiting structures are ephemeral and often inconspicuous, the basic taxonomic work is still woefully incomplete, and there are few people trained to do the work. As a result within the entire continent of North America there is not a single regional, state, or local catalogue of the macrofungal species that presents a credible account of the species present and their distributions.The contrast to Europe is striking. The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland all have surveyed mushrooms and produced extremely useful keys and distribution maps (Krieglsteiner, 1991; Anonymous, 2012a,b), and the Funga Nordica (Knudsen & Vesterholt, 2012) provides an excellent model for a modern mycoflora for Northern Europe. This is not just a problem for fungal biologists or for North America. In fact the problem is most acute for plant scientists that need to identify the mycorrhizal or pathogenic fungal associates of their plants, and for fungal ecologists that need a global view of diversity. Without a mycoflora identification is an impossible task for the nonspecialist, and without an accurate catalogue of species and their ranges no global patterns can be assembled. Thus the real advantage in a mycoflora is that it makes fungi accessible to nonspecialists. To rectify this problem, the first meeting for the North American Mycoflora project just took place in New Haven, Connecticut in July. The meeting was the culmination of the Fungal Environmental Sampling and Informatics Network, an National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research coordination network that New Phytologist readers may be familiar with from early meetings (Bruns et al., 2008). A long way to go, so why now?