Pune Alive : Mushroom Diversity 2000

Kingdom Fungi constitutes amongst the most diverse group of organisms, that also exhibit myriad enigmatic shapes, caps and parasols, balls and crumples sheets, layered plats and overlapping shingles, muted and gaudy. These appear suddenly amongst the fallen leaves, on trees or encrusting dead wood, just after the first shower of the monsoon. Despite their popularity, not many people know mushrooms as being fruiting, rather spore producing bodies of some fungi. Fungi are crucial in the terrestrial ecosystem, as dominant decomposers and have applications in various industries. This dataset is from the “Pune Alive - a directory of Pune biodiversity’ in which documented occurrence records of 64 genera belonging to 31 families of fungi from Pune, Maharashtra, India.