Telluride Mushroom Festival: Dr. Andy Wilson on Colorado Mycoflora Project+

11 Aug Telluride Mushroom Festival: Dr. Andy Wilson on Colorado Mycoflora Project+

The 38th annual Telluride Mushroom Festival takes place Thursday, August 16 – Sunday, August 19. The full schedule is here. Migrate around the site to find info on presenters, venues, book-signings etc. Or simply filter by topic or venue. Tickets/passes here. 

The Beer Launch takes place Wednesday, August 15, at the Sheridan Opera House.

The Gondola Plaza Mushroom Extravaganza, formerly known as the Chef’s Cook-off, takes place Friday, noon, at Gondola Plaza. This year, Olga Cotter coordinates the event.

The Telluride Mushroom Festival parade, which takes place on Saturday, August 18, 4 p.m., is open to the general public. The over-the-top spectacle is not to be missed.

At the Telluride Mushroom Festival, Dr. Andy Wilson is scheduled to talk about Mycoflora Project, the challenges, potential rewards, and how everyone can contribute to the Colorado effort. For more please scroll down to listen to Wilson’s podcast. And to support the Colorado Mycoflora Project, go here.

The North American Mycoflora Project is an effort to document the diversity of macrofungi (mushrooms, puffballs, corals, and other fleshy fungi) on the continent. And the Southern Rockies of Colorado have some of largest expanse of uninterrupted montane forests in the United States, home to a vast community mushroom forming fungi.

Dr. Andrew Wilson is Assistant Curator of Mycology in the Sam Mitchel Herbarium of Fungi at Denver Botanic Gardens, which has over 18,000 collections of macrofungi, 80% of which represent taxa native to Colorado.

The Herbarium is a regional contributor to the North American Mycoflora Project, but the massive undertaking requires more than just professional contributions. Any attempt to document mushroom diversity in the region demands the involvement of students, amateur mycologists, and motivated Citizen Scientists.

At the Telluride Mushroom Festival, Dr. Andrew Wilson is scheduled to talk about the effort: the challenges, potential rewards, and how everyone can contribute to the Colorado Mycoflora Project.

According to the North American Mycoflora Project website, the goals of the Colorado project include:

• Accomplish a five-year goal of DNA barcoding 1000 native Colorado species of macrofungi.
• Use ITS sequence data (the barcode for fungi) to compare the “well known” Colorado fungi to the European and other species, whose names are currently being applied.
• Produce useful taxonomic papers and functional keys for regional fungal species and groups.
• Train and deploy Citizen Scientists from the Colorado Mycological Society and participating mushroom clubs to help document the diversity of macrofungi throughout the state and neighboring states connected to the Southern Rockies.
• Assemble an ITS database of native Colorado fungi to evaluate fungal communities using next generation sequencing methods.

More about Dr. Andrew Wilson:

Dr. Andy Wilson, on fire about the Colorado Mycoflora Project.

For Dr. Andrew Wilson, the discovery of mycology began back in the late 90’s at San Francisco State University. There he took classes from Dr. Dennis Desjardin, a world-renowned mushroom taxonomist and learned that mycology could take him on exotic adventures to places such as Hawaii and tropical Southeast Asia.

Wilson jumped at the opportunity to work with Desjardin, completing a masters thesis on the mushroom genus Gymnopus from Java and Bali, Indonesia. He later went on to earn a PhD in the lab of Dr. David Hibbett (another featured speakers at the Telluride Mushroom Festival) at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. His project took him back to Southeast Asia, this time to study the ecology and evolution enigmatic puffball genus Calostoma and their relatives.

In 2009, Wilson graduated and began a post-doc with Dr. Gregory Mueller at the Chicago Botanic Garden where he explored the systematic evolution of the Cantharellales and the model ectomycorrhizal mushroom genus Laccaria.

He also did a one-year postdoc at Purdue University, in the lab of Dr. Cathie Aime, yet another Telluride presenter, teasing apart the complex evolution of plant pathogenic rust fungi.

At Denver Botanic Gardens, Wilson is working on a regional contribution to the North American Mycoflora Project that encompasses the state of Colorado, with a focus on the Southern Rockies.