Welcome to FungiSight on iNaturalist!
Thanks to Tony at iNaturalist's help team, we've resolved the issue with our species list and are ready to go! You can now add observations of any species of our target genera (see our project list) to the FungiSight project.
My name is Grace, I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne. I study Agaricus- and I am particularly keen to find out what species of Agaricus we have here in Australia and across the ditch in good old NZ. We have a lot of undescribed native species and for my PhD, I'm hoping to identify as many of them as I can, name some and work out how our Australasian Agaricus fit in with the rest of the world's.
I started FungiSight on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/fungisight) when I was doing my Master's degree - back before iNaturalist was available to us in Australia. I needed to collect fresh fungi for my research but it's so hard to know when and where they were fruiting. I needed eyes on the ground telling me when and where they were popping up so I could go collect them. And you all rose to the challenge magnificently! Thanks to you, I was able to collect enough fresh Agaricus xanthodermus to do my research- and I'm now in the process of publishing our results on A. xanthodermus toxicity.
Now iNaturalist is here and I would LOVE your Australian Agaricus observations! We've even extended the FungiSight family to include research projects for some fellow mycologists: my supervisor, Teresa (Botanic Gardens and State Herbarium of South Australia), my Phd "sister" Fran Guard in QLD, and fungal ecologist Sapphire. We're also keeping an eye on the spread of some Amanita species.
I'll keep you posted with our research and I look forward to seeing any observations you can share with us!
Cheers,
Grace
