Brazilian Funga Gallery
The Brazilian Funga Gallery was created with the purpose of popularizing part of the beautiful diversity of fungi that we have in Brazil. We already know that brazilian fungi species are very diverse in terms of form, size, color, ecological functions, niches and natural requirements that need to be shared to the public. But the importance of this gallery’s creation is not limited to showing the beauty of our country’s Funga. The pictures of fungi contained within the gallery can be used as a tool for future studies and establishment of public policies surrounding threatened species conservation. Moreover, the gallery can also be used for educational purposes in institutions of varying educational degrees, from superior to basic education, putting fungi closer to the day-to-day lives of children and young adults, while stimulating their curiosity surrounding the huge diversity contained within the group. We want to popularize the brazilian Funga by giving it the spotlight that it deserves, mainly because, in general, fungi are very neglected in terms of academic and popular acknowledgement, even though the group is responsible for major ecological services that make living on the planet possible.
The Brazilian Funga Gallery was built as a group effort made by many partners and collaborators, during the neural network training phase of the MIND.Funga APP to recognize and suggest names for fungal species. The pictures that constitute the gallery were taken from the database of the app, available at the data storage website Mendeley Data. Our group has 17.467 pictures stored at the database, corresponding to more than 500 species (Drechsler-Santos et al. 2023 DOI: 10.17632/sfrbdjvxcc.2). During the making of the gallery, we prioritized the specimens identified to species level, totalizing 332 species. It’s important to emphasize that the efforts towards the amplification of the database will be recurrent, and consequently the gallery will be periodically updated with upcoming new registries.
Including the MIND.Funga team, many collaborators and volunteers from many parts of the country participated in building the database, like facebook group participants, partner scientists and citizens participating in the Citizen Science program for the MIND.Funga APP neural network training. For more information regarding picture authorship, contact us through the email address mind.funga@gmail.com.
We want to thank the many financers that make our projects possible (CNPq, CAPES, FAPESC, SBPC, The MBZ Species Conservation Fund, Indianapolis Zoo Conservation Grant Program, etc.). Furthermore, we want to show our special gratitude towards all the collaborators and supporters of MIND.Funga (https://mindfunga.ufsc.br/apoiadores-e-colaboradores-1/ e https://mindfunga.ufsc.br/mind-funga-ciencia-cidada/ ).
We want to emphasize that we are offering much more than research and extension. The Brazilian Funga Gallery is a powerful teaching tool that can be used to share knowledge about fungi to students of all educational levels. Only than, with popularization and growing engagement surrounding the brazilian Funga, we will be acting in favor of it’s conservation and the quality of life of our society and environment.
The gallery can be accessed through the following link:
https://galeria.ufsc.br/mindfunga/
