Finnish fungal atlas as a conservation and education tool

2018

Fungi are a challenging organism group to study and often amateurs need extensive help to be able to correctly identify their fungal collections. Fungi could be used for an example as indicators of environmental changes and as a tool to evaluate the conservation value of endangered biotopes. However, all this requires reliable and extensive observation databases on fungi. If citizen scientists are not well enough educated, their contribution may be even harmful due to decreased data quality. To achieve more reliable information of habitat requirements, distribution and risk status of fungi in Finland we started a citizen science project called Sieniatlas (Finnish Fungal Atlas) in 2016, and …