About

About the website

agaric.us houses a manually curated, up-to-date list of the generic names of agarics and Agaricales. The files here include basic, important information about all scientific names at the rank of genus, accepted or unaccepted, that, in (any of) their current circumscription(s), (1) ever produce gilled mushrooms, and/or (2) belong to the order Agaricales.

This content should represent current, authoritative work. Most often, for a given issue, it is obvious that the most recent source to devote attention to it is the most authoritative. In some cases of subjective taxonomic disagreement, a lumped (s.l.) and split (s.str.) circumscription are shown. Often, however, other factors like rules of nomenclature, strength of phylogenetic trees, and confidence in assertion, have inspired me to follow sources other than the most recent one (or disagreeing two). Thus, this content is not strictly objective, in that it is not generated by following an algorithm. However, it is not based on or influenced by my own subjective taxonomic opinions (what should be lumped and what should be split). In fact, I passionately disagree with many of the taxonomic choices reflected here.

Names included here must be included in Index Fungorum and/or the nearly equivalent MycoBank. On the rare occasion that a name is encountered that is validly published but not included in those larger databases, it is submitted to Index Fungorum before being included here.

Q. Given that the names in agaric.us are a small subset of the names in Index Fungorum (less than 1/400), why visit agaric.us?

A. For those who are interested in the relevant taxa, this site, unlike the larger databases:

(1) keeps track of mushroom forms (basic morphological categories) - most importantly, whether or not a genus produces gilled mushrooms.

(2) keeps track of DNA sequencing status.

(3) keeps track of taxonomic doubt for accepted genera.

(4) compiles in one place all nomenclatural problems with accepted genera.

(5) provides citations for family placements and for doubtful acceptance.

(6) provides the reason for unacceptance for all unaccepted genera.

(7) provides a phylogenetic tree with all accepted genera.

(8) provides data in a convenient (small) PDF or (large) XLSX file.

and (9) provides an update log that also functions as a feed for relevant taxonomic updates in new publications.

(10) In general, being dedicated to a smaller set of names allows one to curate them with more accuracy and currency. For known discrepancies with IF, citations are provided to support my interpretation. Although these discrepancies only represent a small fraction of the data, and ideally will eventually be resolved (in either direction), we currently cannot synchronize the two databases nearly as quickly as this one can be updated.

About the mushrooms

All of the included genera belong to the class Agaricomycetes (subphylum Agaricomycotina, phylum Basidiomycota, subkingdom Dikarya, kingdom Fungi). Gilled mushrooms evolved several times among their pored, toothed, wrinkled, smooth, gasteroid & crust-like relatives in the Agaricomycetes, perhaps once for each of the 11 orders in which they appear. Most gilled mushrooms belong to the order Agaricales and most members of the Agaricales are gilled.

Determining whether or not a genus belongs to the Agaricales is clear-cut, at least in principle, via nomenclatural types. There is a consensus on which clade represents the Agaricales, so a phylogenetic analysis of a type is more or less conclusive.

Determining whether a genus produces gilled mushrooms is less clear-cut. Mushroom morphology is plastic enough that one can find intermediates between almost any two forms one might choose. agaric.us aims for the widest reasonable concept of "gills", so that anyone who has found what they consider to be a gilled mushroom can be confident that its genus appears on the site. For the limits of agarics, consider that Auricularia (for A. mesenterica), Calathella (for C. digitiformis), and Suillus (for S. paluster) are included, but Cudonia (for C. circinans), Cymatoderma (for C. elegans), and Morchella (for M. anatolica) are not. Gills can be defined as multiple, macroscopic, parallel, regularly spaced, vein-like to plate-like, fertile structures, protruding from and visually predominant over some or all of the mushroom's surface - but for each of these criteria, meeting it or not is a matter of degree.

About the compendium

A snapshot of this data, updated to May 2020, was published in supplementary files to a paper, the text of which describes the background, methods, and results in more detail:
Kalichman, J., Kirk, P.M. & Matheny, P.B. 2020. A compendium of generic names of agarics and Agaricales. Taxon 69(3): 425–447. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12240