Bottoms Up!

Visions for the Future of a North American Mycoflora

• When: Wednesday, April 18, 2018, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
• Where: Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St, Eugene, Oregon 97405

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.

We are riding the early stages of a wave of change in the way taxonomy and floristics are done. Christian Schwarz will be talking about the de-professionalization of taxonomy, open-access publishing, citizen science, and more. Come learn about the North American Mycoflora project; a collaboration between professional mycologists and citizen scientists to identify and map the distribution of macrofungi throughout North America. Discover how you can be a citizen scientist; including how you can join in on local Mycoflora projects.

Christian Schwarz is a naturalist currently living in Santa Cruz, the land of milk (caps) and honey (mushrooms). He studied Ecology and Evolution at UCSC, and now spends his time photographing, teaching about, and making scientific collections of macrofungi. He is the coauthor of “Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast” (www.redwoodcoastmushrooms.org). Fungi satisfy his curiosity with their seemingly endless forms – from the grotesque to the bizarre to the sublimely beautiful. Besides dabbling in mushroom taxonomy, he’s an excitable birder, mediocre fisherman, and passionate about citizen science – particularly through the use of iNaturalist.