Our objectives

        

Our objectives

Collecting actively Pyrenomycetes for a long period and collaborating with eminent taxonomists have led the authors to a certain degree of knowledge about some groups of fungi which, although they have been recently monographed or thoroughly studied by specialists, usually remain out of reach of most of amateurs.

Our main objective is to share this knowledge with amateurs through photographic illustrations and short descriptions of the fungi that we collected and that have been rarely or never illustrated. In order to reach this objective we have chosen to present for each species, as far as possible, several photographs of the same fungus at different stages of maturation, including the anamorph when it occurs in natural conditions. In addition, we intend to give for each illustrated species the peculiar ecological data that we observed and our comments about its identification.

The descriptions are based on our own observations, even if they do not exactly match the descriptions found in the literature. Another objective of this site is to collect additional data from its users about species whose morphological variations are not completely known, actually all of them!

In addition, this site will be an opportunity to present specimens that we collected but remained unnamed. We hope it will bring contacts with mycologists who have a name to propose or have already collected a similar taxon.

Some genera are both well known thanks to recent monographs and well represented in our region. We decided to emphasize the presentation of these groups through detailed descriptions and comments, and we plan to propose keys to European species belonging to those genera. Hypoxylon Bull. is the first genus presented this way, it should be rapidly followed by the xylariaceous genera that are closely related to it.

Various genera belonging to Xylariales, Hypocreales, Sordariales, Loculoascomycetes are also planned to be illustrated with time, most of them with short descriptions and comments, some with a more detailed study. In addition, a few outstanding Discomycetes collections might be illustrated in the future, but it will remain marginal therefore the front page title will remain "Pyrenomycetes from southwestern France".

 

Help please!

Among species known from other parts of Europe, but not yet found in southwestern France, some of them are very likely to be present in our collecting areas (because common elsewhere or known from nearby areas, e.g., the species that are included in the proposed keys but are not yet illustrated or described). We would greatly appreciate receiving European collections of these species in order to complete this site.