2019 February General Meeting: Christian Schwarz (by )
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Please join us for our General Meeting at the Harvey West Scout House. Refreshments will be provided and informal mushroom ID from 7:00 - 7:30. A discussion of upcoming events will precede our speaker, Christian Schwarz.
A modern important aspect of hunting mushrooms is the opportunity to become a citizen scientist by collecting data to be used by future or on-going mycological research. And it turns out that this is actually not at all difficult by using the cellphone app called iNaturalist. The concept is that you are able to record your finds simply by taking a photograph and downloading it to iNat. The location data, date, etc. are automatically recorded. It is absolutely not necessary to name the mushroom since a number of crack-IDers will do that for you plus the app will reply to you with that ID. The FFSC is very supportive of on-going research, especially here in our county. We have been supporting Christian Schwarz’s project, The Mycoflora of Santa Cruz County for a number of years. The goal of that project is to document and describe every mushroom found in the county, including photos and molecular sequencing. By using iNat, adding many other observations of mushrooms in the county can dramatically increase the possibility that the goal could be met. The FFSC is therefore strongly suggesting that its members use iNat when out collecting. Our February meeting will be a hands-on session on how to do that. Christian will lead a workshop on how to use iNat. To get the most out of this meeting is it highly recommended that you come to the meeting with iNat already loaded onto your cellphone ` To make an iNaturalist account, first visit https://www.inaturalist.org/signup. You can make an account with your email address or link it to a social media profile like Facebook. After that, download the iNaturalist app for your phone and log in. You can then start getting familiar with the app by visiting: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started. What all that looks like, plus a few extra tips, will be covered at the meeting.
Please plan to attend the next meeting on Febuary 20 complete with your cellphone already loaded with the iNat app and learn how you can contribute to science.
Christian Schwarz is a mushroom enthusiast and taxonomist and citizen science advocate from Santa Cruz, the land of milk (caps) and honey (mushrooms). He graduated from UCSC, and now spends his time photographing, teaching about, and making scientific collections of macrofungi. He is coauthor of "Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast", and is slowly building a mycoflora for Santa Cruz County. Fungi satisfy his curiosity with their seemingly endless forms (from the grotesque to the bizarre to the sublime). Besides mushroom taxonomy and mycofloristics, he’s an excitable birder and mediocre fisherman.