Meeting and Speaker, January 2021 | Christian Schwarz - Long-Term Lessons

A discussion of upcoming events and minister's reports will precede our speaker, Christian Schwarz.

Christian's talk is titled: Long-Term Lessons: Persepectives From Three Years of Mushroom Monitoring

As mushroom hunters, we enjoy travelling far and wide, bouncing from place to place and following the rains to stay with the season. But happens when we focus on revisiting the same small areas whether there has been rain or not? And what if we take it a step further, and rather than just harvesting chanterelles or photographing the flashiest species, we take the time to pay attention to everything, counting individual fruitbodies and keeping track of changes from year to to year? Christian has been undertaking just such an effort for the past three years, supported by a grant from the Save the Redwoods League – and this year, some of his survey transects were burned in the CZU Fire. Join us to hear what discoveries, lessons, and patterns have emerged from this ambitious project.

Christian Schwarz is a naturalist currently living in Santa Cruz, the land of milk (caps) and honey (mushrooms). He studied Ecology and Evolution at UCSC, and now spends his time photographing, teaching about, collecting, and researching macrofungi. He is coauthor of "Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast”. Fungi satisfy his curiosity with their seemingly endless forms – from the grotesque to the bizarre to the sublimely beautiful. Besides dabbling in mushroom taxonomy, he loves fish, plants, nudibranchs, moths, and dragonflies. He is passionate about community science, especially iNaturalist. He is a Research Associate at the Norris Center for Natural History at UC Santa Cruz as well as the Santa Barbara Botanical Garden.

Photo: Arrhenia chlorocyanea. © Christian Schwarz (CC-BY-NC) (inaturalist.org, obs. 146988710)