MIND.Funga – Monitoring and Inventorying Neotropical Diversity of Fungi

The MIND.Funga team in partnership with members of the IUCN Commission for the Survival of Fungal Species is promoting the 1st Brazilian Fungal Species Assessment Workshop for the IUCN Global Red List. The event will take place in three online meetings in September and October:

• 1st meeting: the group will discuss the application of the IUCN criteria for assessing the conservation status of species through theoretical and practical activities;

Participants of the first meeting of the 1st Brazilian Workshop on Fungal Species Assessment for the IUCN Global Red List.

• 2nd meeting: Workshop guests will bring assessment information of 2 or 3 species already in the proposal format to be on the IUCN red list. The proposals will be discussed and improved with the support of the professors;
• 3rd meeting: each participant will present new assessment information together with the species already discussed in the second meeting. The proposals will be evaluated by a certified IUCN evaluator, and each participant will have about 10 proposed species and evaluated in the first stage of the preposition.

We invited 17 mycologists and lichenologists (mostly Brazilians) to participate in this important initiative for the conservation biology and recognition of Funga.

The main idea of ​​the event is to engage Brazilian mycology/lichenology specialists in the extremely important topic of conservation. In this way, we hope that those involved are trained throughout the process and continue to propose species for the global list. We need, as Brazilian mycology, to generate a wave of collaborations and that is why we have as supporting partners, the Species Survival Commission International Union for Conservation of Nature (SSC IUCN), MIND.Funga/MICOLAB/UFSC, the Brazilian Society of Mycology (SBMic), the Center for Specialists in Mycology of the Botanical Society of Brazil (NEMic from SBB) and the INCT Virtual Herbarium of Flora and Funga.

MIND.Funga citizen science: children’s literature meets fungal taxonomy in the schools through “SBPC Vai à Escola

The children’s book “Discovering the little things”, produced by MIND.Funga with the support of SBPC, FAPESC, CNPq, and CAPES is now available also in English, German and Spanish versions, in addition to the original Portuguese version.
Read more about our project and download the versions of our book by clicking on the book cover above.

1st Symposium of Fungal Diversity Conservation in Cloud Forest

The 1st Symposium of Fungal Diversity Conservation in Cloud Forest emerges as result of the activities of the research groups of the Laboratory of Molecular and Computational Biology of Fungi (UFMG) and MIND.Funga (MICOLAB-UFSC) in the quest to get to know the Funga of a megadiverse ecosystem, full of endemisms and heavily threatened, the Cloud Forests. The main objective of the symposium is to demonstrate to the participants the importance of studying Funga in this environment. The event’s target audience is undergraduate and graduate students, professors, and researchers. The speakers (national and international) will present results and perspectives of research carried out with fungi in Cloud Forests around the world, from the perspective of biodiversity, the potential for discovering new species, ecology, and conservation.

Follows the web site link: http://sympfungacf.com.br/

Diversity and Conservation of Macrofungi BOT7027

How about learning a little more about the enormous diversity of macrofungi?

The elective course “Diversity and Conservation of Macrofungi” will be offered during the 2020.2 semester (February 1 to May 17) by the PhD professors here at MIND.Funga, Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler-Santos and Genivaldo Alves Silva! Classes will take place every Monday in the afternoon and will feature asynchronous and synchronous meetings.

You’re all invited!