Fungus Site Quality Index

In the late 90s the BMS joined the Forestry Commission in a biodiversity project to which many members of the Society contributed records. One of the spin-off studies of this project was a manuscript prepared by the late Jack Marriott. Unfortunately this never saw the light of day but we feel that it is worth publishing. It helps mycologists assess the importance of their favourite collecting patches to find out which justify more active attention, for example as candidate Important Fungus Areas. For others it allows a site to be assessed for its fungi against a reproducible background scale. In this way a site can be recommended for its mycodiversity or rejected when limited resources are available for fungus conservation and funding needs to be concentrated on other areas.

One of us (R. Watling) assisted in the Forestry Commission study and both actively discussed data, supplying lists and notes to Jack. The manuscript is especially important because of his considerable understanding of statistical approaches to mycological recording. Jack’s children Henry, Valerie and Michael are supportive of this. The authors carried out dedicated fungus collecting in Bog Wood, near Skipton Yorkshire England (A. McAdam) and in Heron Wood and Dawyck Garden Policy Site, near Peebles, Scotland (R. Watling). Data from other mycologists was also included. In Heron Wood the plan of action proposed by Jack has been continued for several more years (Watling, 2015). The two sites at Dawick have been assessed using Jack’s SQI method and Feest’s (2006) transect method. Different results between sites were obtained. There was more agreement with the transect method in the beech plantation at Heron Wood than with the expanded Garden Policy Site. This latter consists of specimen trees of many different exotic taxa in isolation and so the transect method of Feest (2006), which works at Heron Wood, misses many of the hot-spots at Dawyck and gives a wrong impression of its mycodiversity. This is probably a result of the host-plant distribution. Jack demonstrated that both Heron Wood and Dawyck Garden form outliers to the main graph in Fig. 6 and he thought this might be due to the inclusion of several rare or uncommon Cortinarius spp. in the data for these two sites. This is a notoriously difficult genus to work with, often by-passed by mycologists, but a special effort was made at each Peebleshire site to identify as many of the cortinarioid taxa as possible. Since modern taxonomy has changed some of the genera used in Marriott’s paper, the authors have brought the nomenclature up-to-date. We have also taken the liberty of rephrasing some statements to make them more easily understood. Otherwise the manuscript below is as Jack Marriott left it before his untimely death.