The WA Naturalists’ Club has been successful in an application to Lotterywest for a two-year fungal project ‘Improving local knowledge of Amanita mushrooms in Western Australia’. The total amount of the grant is $20 000, with $15 000 coming from Lotterywest and the remaining $5 000 from the WA Naturalists’ Club’s Serventy Memorial Fund. The money will be used for molecular sequencing, which is now an integral part of taxonomic work, and this will be done at Curtin University.

This project is a continuation of the past support by the Club into work that has explored the fungal diversity of this state. The first project was the Perth Urban Bushland Fungi (PUBF) project which started in 2004, and many club members participated in its forays and workshops held at local bushlands. PUBF employed Dr Neale Bougher as the mycologist and Ms Roz Hart as the education officer. A field book was produced: ‘Fungi of the Perth Region and Beyond: a self-managed field book’, which is available from the Club.

The second initiative was an Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) grant to produce a volume for the Fungi of Australia series on the fibre cap mushrooms. This work was conducted at the WA Herbarium and also had Neale Bougher as a principal investigator. Members of the WA Naturalists’ Club contributed part of the money for this project.

The PUBF and ABRS projects, together with long term surveys of the fungi of Bold Park and Kings Park conducted by Neale Bougher, have shown that larger fungi are numerous, and many of the local species are unnamed and new to science.

This new project addresses the problem of unnamed local species, targeting a large genus of mycorrhizal fungi, the Amanita.

Amanitas are some of the commonest and most conspicuous mushrooms in the local bush. They are ecologically important as mycorrhizal symbionts of many local woody plants. The genus is easy to recognise in the field, but the species are difficult to separate and identify. Recent work that I and my collaborators have undertaken at Curtin University has led to the description of new species and better characterisation of already named species. This work is based on the macroscopic appearance, microscopic characters, and molecular sequencing. To date about 20 species have been described, or are in the process of description; however at least 30 more await description. This grant from the WA Naturalists’ Club – Lotterywest will fund the molecular sequencing for this taxonomic work.

FloraBase is the ‘go to’ resource for identifying the flora of WA. It is run by the WA Herbarium and includes the correct name, images, description, and distribution of all of the flowering plants in the state. Eventually the WA Herbarium will include larger fungi in FloraBase, but at the moment does not have the resources to do this. However, this WA Naturalists’ Club – Lotterywest project will produce the information required for inclusion in FloraBase, and the WA Herbarium have agreed to include amanitas as and when the descriptions become available. I hope that this will be a really useful outcome of this project, complementing the taxonomic descriptions of local species.

I am extremely grateful to the WA Naturalists’ Club and Lotterywest for supporting this work.

Dr Elaine Davison
e.davison@curtin.edu.au