Intro to McIlvaine's Fungi of Philadelphia

I have been talking about this project with various friends in the myco community for about 2 years now, and we are finally getting off the ground and doing some field work! Let me first start by thanking everybody who has contributed to this project so far. Lots of people have listened to me describe vague ideas, helped me formulate plans, helped me in research and now are joining me in the field to look for mushrooms.

For this first post, I would like to briefly describe this project in a little more detail than what is in the description of the project. The essence of this project is an ecology study: to begin to formulate an idea about how much the mycological flora of Philadelphia has changed over the past 120+ years.

120 years sounds like a pretty random number, but it does have relevance. In 1900, American mycologist Charles McIlvaine published what is considered the first comprehensive U.S. field guide, aimed at the general public. His book, "One Thousand American Fungi", was written in Philadelphia and encompasses McIlvaine's mycological experience in the Northeastern United States. He had a co-author named Robert Macadam (although Mcilvaine is widely considered to be the main writer) as well as substantial assistance from Charles Horton Peck (the New York State Botanist who described over 2,700 species of fungi). In this book, McIlvaine often includes details as to where he collected his mushrooms, sometimes in fine detail. Approximately 100 of the species are noted to have been collected specifically in Philadelphia, sometimes in a general location such as Angora, and sometimes very specifically such as Bartram's Garden.

These types of location details leaves us with a list of mushrooms that McIlvaine claims were present in the city of Philadelphia in the late 19th century (while the book was published in 1900, much of his collecting seems to have been done in the 1880's and 1890's). I've reviewed his book and pulled out all of the mushrooms with Philadelphia specific location data and have updated the names into modern taxonomic nomenclature. The end result is a list that can thought of as a "Wanted" list for mushroom species in Philadelphia. Some of the species are easy and still well known in Philadelphia (Grifola frondosa, for instance). Others are quite puzzling and have not been collected since McIlvaine and Peck's time, leaving us wondering what they were possibly looking at! These are the real mysteries to solve.

While this project started out as a personal endeavor, I knew from the beginning that it would be much more efficient (not to mention FUN) to involve others in the hunt. I pitched the idea to the Philadelphia Mycology Club, suggesting that it be the club's official "North American Mycoflora Project" (see https://mycoflora.org). The club has enthusiastically embraced it, for which I am most grateful.

The goal of this project is to visit various sites throughout Philadelphia and attempt to find the mushrooms that McIlvaine found at the end of the 19th century. The hypothesis is that many of these mushrooms will no longer exist within the city, due to changes in the tree populations, loss of habitat, changes in soil composition and other environmental factors. But many of these mushrooms will be found, and maybe we will be surprised by what we do uncover. We will compile a list of the mushrooms that are still present in the city, collecting and vouchering when appropriate and feasible. This 21st century list, when compared with the 19th century list, will begin to shed some light on possible changes in Philadelphia's mycoflora.

The club has already had several outings and we have found several mushrooms that fit into our list within a short period of time. After a few trial runs, I am working out kinks and protocols for how to record our data. iNaturalist will be a big part of it, hence this journal post and project. I will be publishing some guidelines in the near future with better protocols on collecting (especially after the North American Mycoflora Project re-boots itself in early August), and the PMC will continue having small, focused mushroom hunts looking for McIlvaine's mushrooms. This journal will serve as a communication tool to project members.

In the meantime, please upload all of your Philadelphia mushroom finds onto iNaturalist. The Philadelphia Mycology Club Project will collect all fungi taxa finds in the city, and I am placing filters on the taxa that are part of this list. As I get notifications of these finds, I will manually add the observations to this project. So anybody that is documenting mushrooms within Philadelphia and uploading them to iNaturalist can be included in this project! If you would like to become more involved and join for focused mushroom hunts, please email me at: smithson122374@gmail.com and I will add you to the foray list. And if you really want to be a real rock star, study the "Wanted" list and go find these mushrooms anywhere in the city!

The full list of "Wanted" mushrooms can be found here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/phillymycoclub/permalink/1201667373518652/

Posted on August 2, 2020 08:36 PM by mycofreak mycofreak

Comments

Great project.

Posted by colinpurrington over 3 years ago

Thanks!

Posted by mycofreak over 3 years ago

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