The Warwickshire Fungus Group has recently been formed as an email group to enable the field meetings of the Warwickshire Fungus Survey See below to continue after the Survey was disbanded in 2021. Beginners are always welcome. To ensure that you do not arrive at a foray that has been cancelled or moved, it is important to be a member of the Warwickshire Fungus Group email group. The field meetings co-ordinator, John Walton, will send an e mail a few days before the meeting with any changes due to inclement weather or a poor fruiting period.

If you are planning to come to a meeting, it is your responsibility to check your emails for changes.

After a foray, please check A Fungus Flora of Warwickshire and the Additions to the Flora to confirm that any of the less-common species that you have collected have already been recorded for the County. If they have not, PLEASE KEEP DRIED MATERIAL for the herbarium. Please send lists of species that you have found on the forays in Warwickshire to John Walton. Where possible, please state the habitat and associated trees and plants for each record.

Permission has been obtained from landowners to collect for scientific purposes. In the interests of conservation, please do not collect more specimens than necessary for your personal use. We do not encourage collection of specimens for culinary purposes

The Warwickshire Fungus Group is an informal interest group with no formal status or legal identity. All attendees participating in events in our programme do so entirely at their own risk and no responsibility for any injury, loss or damage shall lie against the organisers. The distribution of events is not intended to and does not form any contract or any other legal relationship between the organisers and the participants. The Warwickshire Fungus Group is affiliated to the British Mycological Society.

The Warwickshire Fungus Group looks at fungi in the old Vice County of Warwickshire, which is Warwickshire as it was understood in 1852. Vice Counties


 


The Warwickshire Fungus Survey

The survey was started in 1965, at the suggestion of Dr. Nancy Montgomery, and with the close co-operation of Dr Gill Brand, ne้ Butler, then both of Birmingham University.

An enthusiastic group of amateur and professional mycologists, worked during the following fifteen years to produce the Fungus Flora of Warwickshire. This group was the first of its kind anywhere, devoting itself to the identification of fungi, lichens and myxomycetes. The group was the mycological section of Birmingham Natural History Society. The society employed its resources to aid the production of the Flora.

The Fungus Flora was published in 1980 by the British Mycological Society and edited by the late Malcolm Clark. It contains detailed records of the fungi found in the area, at least one specimen with detailed notes was dried and kept in the herbarium.

It was obvious, even with the publication of the Flora that new species were still turning up, and that the Survey was well worth carrying on. Since 1980, supplements have been published in the Proceedings of the Birmingham Natural History Society. New members continue to join us.

For anyone who would like to refer to the archived 'Warwickshire Fungus Survey' website.   Warwickshire Fungus Survey



Vice-Counties
The Watsonian Vice Counties were devised by Hewett C. Watson and published first in 1852 in his 'Cybele Britannica'. Essentially they are based on the county divisions at the time, but a number of the larger counties were split up so that each vice-county would represent a more or less equal recording area. The vice-county system presents a standard recording pattern, to which all county floras follow. No matter how many boundary alterations are carried out by Government, the recording areas remain the same, so that exact comparisons can be made between present records and those published in the past. Details of the vice county boundaries, with both text and maps, were published by the Ray Society, (Dandy 1969).
Dandy, J.E. 1969 'Watsonian Vice Counties of Great Britain', the Ray Society, London.



 


 


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