Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club (WPMC) and Carnegie Museum Team Up for New Fungarium

WPMC is pleased to announce that Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History has been added to the list of Partner Fungaria for the North American Mycoflora Project (NAMP).

NAMP is a collaboration between professional mycologists and citizen scientists to identify and map the distribution of macro-fungi throughout North America. Key components of the project include careful documentation and preparation of specimens (vouchering), depositing these specimens in herbaria where they can be accessed for later examination by anyone researching the organism, and DNA sequencing to complement the morphological observations that amateur mycologists already use. NAMP provides a framework and tools to allow independent projects, organized and administered by local mushroom clubs and other groups, to contribute data to a unified framework for documenting and understanding fungal biodiversity in North America.

During May, WPMC representatives met with Bonnie Isaac, Co-Chair of Collections for Carnegie Museum, to discuss and formalize our agreement to provide the new fungarium with high-quality collections, appropriately preserved and with all of the necessary meta-data. Carnegie Museum would then accession the specimens and upload storage information to the MyCoPortal collections index. On behalf of WPMC’s Scholarship Committee, we presented Bonnie with a check in support of our new partnership.

Blog post courtesy of the Western Pennsylvania Mushroom Club Newsletter, July/August 2019.

Bonnie Isaac is the Collection Manager in the Section of Botany. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.