Our September meeting will feature this year’s George Verback Scholarship recipient, Carolyn Delevich. Carolyn will be presenting “What Lies Beneath: The Art of Detecting Fungal Communities in Soil”.
The meeting will be held on 9/18 from 7-9pm at the Humboldt Universalist Unitarian Fellowship (24 Fellowship Way, Bayside, CA) & streamed via Zoom. We'll have social time, show and tell (bring your mugs & mushrooms!), and raffle from 7-7:30pm, then we'll discuss club business from 7:30 until about 7:45. After club business, we'll introduce our speaker.
Talk Description:
As most mushroom foragers know, fungal fruiting follows seasonal patterns. For example, a wet and chilly Humboldt fall brings an abundance of fungi to the surface. We come to know our favorite foraging spots in which familiar mushrooms appear year after year. As much as we know and love these spots, how well do we really know them and the fungi they’re home to? Just how much fungal diversity is hidden underground, dynamically growing and changing out of sight from human eyes?
Advances in DNA sequencing technology have cracked open the black box of fungal communities in soils that we often don’t see. Since the first fungal genome was sequenced in 1996, this molecular revolution has changed the way we see fungi when our vision alone isn’t enough. I’ll discuss some of the big questions in mycology that we can now address through fungal DNA sequencing. I will explain the process of how a dime-sized amount of soil can describe an entire community of fungi. I hope to unearth a new appreciation for all fungi, even those that lie beneath the surface and beyond our scope of vision.
Speaker Bio:
Carolyn is this year’s recipient of the George Verback Scholarship. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from The Ohio State University in 2013, she assisted in tropical ecology research for the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and later the Agence Nationale des Parcs Nationaux in Gabon. In 2021, she earned her Master’s from Humboldt State University, studying fungal ecology with Dr. Terry Henkel in tropical forests of Guyana and Cameroon. After nearly a decade devoted to tropical field research, she transitioned to developing software tools for data acquisition and analysis. While her current work focuses on computer programming, she has maintained her love of field work through a research project studying the symbiosis between alders and their root symbionts in interior Alaska as part of her PhD thesis.
This talk will be streamed via Zoom! Zoom begins at 7:30pm.
Link: https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86207821863?pwd=SB7qmTX0SSw5YgS4t0JAv4m3XT2I2k.1
Meeting ID: 862 0782 1863
Passcode: 093651
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