Long-term Macrofungal Monitoring: The Basics

As mushroom enthusiasts, we have a tendency to chase the rains, trying to time our visits to the woods to coincide with abundant mushroom activity. This is certainly the case for folks who are chasing one or two edible species in particular, but it’s also true even for those of us mostly interested in documenting fungal biodiversity in general. In some ways, we in the latter group are even more likely to scatter our attention, since we’re always on the search for something new, unusual, and exciting! All of this makes plenty of sense – it usually seems like the most fun-oriented approach.

But by using our time and attention this way, we might miss the opportunity to get a basic sense of the diversity, ecology, and seasonal patterns of mushroom populations at a single location over time.

If we take the time to pay more sustained attention to a smaller area, we are likely to learn a lot: Species we’d never noticed before, seasonal patterns of fruiting that we hadn’t keyed in on, and more subtle longe-term differences between years.

By recording a set of simple data: The area we search, the time we spend, and the number of fruitbodies of each different species that we see; we can build important knowledge about mushroom populations and patterns over time.

Amazingly, there’s almost no datasets of this kind available for fungi in the US! So how can you help? By doing it!

I’ve been doing surveys of this kind for three years on ten transects located in Redwood forests throughout Santa Cruz County, California, supported by a grant from the Save the Redwoods League. I’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t – there are many subtleties of this task I could write about, confusing aspects of methodology I could clarify, and advice I could give regarding the challenges you’ll invariably face. More blog posts are coming in the future that will be dedicated to all of those things. But for now, I want to simply communicate the basic protocol for Long-Term Macrofungal Monitoring.

Here’s how to get started.

1. Choose a transect. This will be the area you survey repeatedly, so make sure that you enjoy being there and that it is easy to access. I stuck to well-established trails that depart directly from parking areas. The length of your transect should be some nice whole-number metric distance (500 meters or 1 km are good choices). You can use running or hiking smartphone apps to measure this distance and record a GPS file that you can save and share.

2. Make repeat surveys. Approximately every 7-10 days during the rainy season/mushroom season, collect data on your transect. There are just a few steps to remember when doing a survey:

   1. Record the date and location, as well as your start and end times.

   2. Walk the same path every time you visit (don’t go off-trail in different places every time), and walk at an appropriate pace to see mushrooms (don’t jog or hurry!). My 1-kilometer transects usually take me anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours depending on how many mushrooms are present!

   3. In your notebook, record every species of mushroom you can confidently identify, as well as how many of them you saw (this means the number of caps or stems for most mushrooms). This can be done as tally marks, numbers separated by commas, whatever works for you. Make sure to keep up your effort over the whole transect and try not to double-count any mushrooms. Don’t be afraid to make rough estimates if you feel overwhelmed by large numbers or are unsure how to count species with irregular shapes. And if you feel frustrated or confused, just remember to do your best and enjoy yourself!

   4. Walk the transect back to the starting point (you’ll always miss mushrooms that you’ll see when facing the opposite direction on a trail!)

   5. Did you remember to record your end time? This is your friendly reminder.

3. Transcribe and share your data. I wish I had more to tell you about how best to do this. The clear solution would be a smartphone app that users could download and use for submitting survey results to a shared database. But I’m not an app developer (are you? Interested in taking this on? Contact me!). I transcribe my data into a spreadsheet (download a blank version here) that I keep backed up to a Google Drive folder. Not the most elegant solution, but it works for now.
   
   Please contact me with questions about establishing and surveying your own long-term monitoring transects by emailing me at:
   cfs.myko AT gmail dot com