THE Great Aussie Fungi Hunt 2026 is on, and community members are playing their part in a worldwide effort to catalogue mushroom species.
The Great Aussie Fungi Hunt is a yearly event organised by Fungimap, a not for profit, citizen-science organisation dedicated to researching and protecting Australian fungi.
One of the chief goals of the event is to encourage the participation of everyone, regardless of their knowledge on the field.
“It’s all citizen science, it’s not just researchers sitting in a university working on this,” said mycologist Heidi Prichard. “You don’t even have to know [about fungi], you just have to be interested.”
By downloading the free app iNaturalist, users can make “observations” by taking pictures of mushrooms that they find during their walks and cataloguing their location.
The data is verified through user collaboration and uploaded to a large database, where it will be able to help scientists to map the known species of fungi and, ideally, further the knowledge on the ones that are still a mystery.
“We’ve got estimates from about 250 thousand up to a million fungi species in Australia and the world, and less than 10 per cent of them are described by science with a name. There’s lots of unknown things to discover,” said Ms Prichard.
The overall event has been a success, with 50,000 fungi observations expected to be submitted this month by users all across Australia.
By Nico LOMBARDO
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