Dennis Desjardin: A New Field Guide to California Mushrooms
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Please join us for our General Meeting at the Harvey West Scout House. A surprise for this month: we'll start with an informal potluck on the picnic tables outside the Scout House at 6. Feel free to bring a dish to share. If your dish contains mushrooms, thanks for keeping to the Suggested Species List. Doors open at 7, with refreshments and informal mushroom ID from 7:00 - 7:30. A discussion of upcoming events will precede our speaker, Dr. Dennis Desjardin, Professor of Biology, San Francisco State University.
Dr. Desjardin presents: A New Field Guide to California Mushrooms. Dennis is lead author on an all-color field guide that treats over 1,100 species of CA mushrooms, with complete descriptions of 650 species, and over 750 color photographs. It is published by Timber Press in large format (8.5" x 11"), hardcover, about 580 pages. He will present what the field guide is all about, how decisions were made on what to include, and the melding of nomenclature and taxonomy, morphology and phylogeny, and the problems encountered when writing such a tome. He will show plenty of beautiful photographs presenting a sampling of species covered in the book.
Desjardin received a Master's Degree from San Francisco State University studying with Dr. Harry D. Thiers, and a PhD from the University of Tennessee under the guidance of Dr. Ronald H. Petersen. He also had the privilege of being trained by Drs. Alexander H. Smith, Rolf Singer, Meinhard Moser and Egon Horak. He has published over 125 scientific papers on the taxonomy and evolution of mushroom-forming fungi in which he described 225 new species and 7 new genera. He is co-author of the field guide Mushrooms of Hawai'i (Ten Speed Press, 2002). He has active research projects in the Hawaiian Islands, Micronesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, and the African islands of São Tome and Principe, funded by grants from the National Science Foundation. A recent interest is in the origin and evolution of bioluminescent fungi. Born and raised in Crescent City, California, he has been collecting and studying California mushrooms for 60 years.