Meeting – May 17, 2017
- When: Wednesday, May 17, 2017 from 7:00pm to 9:00pm
- Where: Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St, Eugene, Oregon 97405
Fungi are most famous as mushrooms, delectable or dangerous, sprouting from the forest floor. Researchers have realized that the real magic of these organisms, however, lies in their invisible lives as protectors, connectors, and destroyers in the forest. Science requires that we watch our step as we go, though, carefully characterizing these complex systems tied together by fungi, without romanticizing or underestimating them. I will draw from my own research to showcase how scientists are using new tools to get a new read on the ancient fairy tales of forest fungi. We will explore connections between the fungi in the canopy and the forest floor in the Andes of Ecuador and the old growth of the Oregon Cascades, and landscape patterns of fungi in the hurricane-battered hills of northern Taiwan.
About the Speaker:
Daniel Thomas is a graduate student at the University of Oregon. He studies fungi under Dr. Bitty Roy and Dr. George Carroll, in the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Dan’s research so far has primarily dealt with plant-fungal interactions in the cloud forest. Dan is a recipient of a $1000 CMS Scholarship Award for a research project titled “Hitchhiking in the Canopy: exploring the “mycobiome” of old growth Douglas-fir leaves”. The goal of the project is to explore the diversity of fungi at varying heights within the Douglas-fir tree canopy of the H. J. Andrews Forest.
The talk is free and open to the public. There will be a mushroom identification session prior to the speaker. Bring what’s in your basket, edible or not, and learn from the experienced members of our community.
