Fungal survey and herbarium revitalization.

Last Spring I stayed at the UC research station on Santa Cruz Island as a student in Don Croll, Erika Zavaleta, and Gage Dayton's UCSC "Supercourse". While on the island, I found a variety of interesting mushrooms and noticed the poor state of the fungal specimens in the station's herbarium. Some mushroom observations I made on the island attracted attention from the mycology community. This is an especially important area from the perspective of mycofloristics, and many mycologists were interested in establishing the presence of island endemics and/or subspecies (particularly in genus Amanita). I spoke to you before leaving the island and you said that I could return in the future to survey the fungal communities in the reserve to supplement the aging/incomplete herbarium. We would photograph and database all of our findings with notes, add specimens to the herbarium, and if possible, transport portions of interesting specimens off-island for in-depth examination and DNA sequencing in Tom Bruns' lab at UC Berkeley.

Christian Schwarz has been the primary curator of the fungus collection at the Natural History Museum at UCSC, he is the Minister of Science for the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz, studied macrofungal ecology at UCSC, and has studied the taxonomy and biogeography of California mushrooms independently for the past seven years. He is currently in the process of writing a field guide titled 'Mushroom of the Redwood Coast", and also surveys management-sensitive mushroom species for the US Forest Service in the Mt. Shasta area, and has given workshops and spoken at many large mycological conferences along the pacific coast.