Rarity and Threat

 

 

 

 

 

 

For other fungi, only a preliminary assessment exists, which can be found on the British Mycological Society website.  Development of a complete Red List has been particularly problematic.  The preliminary assessment, in most cases, attempts to apply IUCN criteria to occurrences of fruiting bodies.  However, the relationship between rarity of fruiting bodies and the rarity of the species is generally unknown.  Furthermore, the ephemeral nature and extreme fluctuations in the appearance of many fruiting bodies, makes the assessment of rarity and decline particularly complex.  By basing an assessment on fruiting bodies, the work tends to focus on rarity of fruiting rather than rarity per se or on decline.  However, this is a good first step towards discovering those species which are truly rare. 

 

We may never know what has been lost for fungi during the well-documented losses of other taxonomic groups since World War II.  We can assume that there have been similar dramatic declines of e.g. fungi of neutral grasslands.  Knowledge of these declines might provide a different nuance to our understanding of environmental change, and the fungal declines may now be preventing effective re-establishment of particular ecosystems.  Further research needs to focus on the fungal communities of Priority Habitats, and identifying whether there are distinct fungal communities within these.  It is also important to identify those habitats that contain internationally important groups of fungi (such as waxcaps).  New molecular approaches may assist in understanding these fungal communities, and also in resolving some of the difficulties that currently prevent confidence in conservation measures.