VIRTUAL EVENTS
Online LECTURE SERIES for 2024
Only NJMA Members will be sent a link to attend online lectures. So be sure to renew your annual NJMA membership in January and not June.
New lectures will be listed when their arrangements have been confirmed.
New lectures will be listed when their arrangements have been confirmed.
Thursday January 25, 2024 7:30pm
Diversity and Evolution of Chanterelles and Allies This talk will discuss the common edible chanterelle mushrooms and their relatives. Despite their appearance, chanterelles are close relatives of a wide assortment of fungi with diverse forms that play many different roles in our ecosystems. How is it that such an oddball assortment of fungi are all closely related? How many species of chanterelles grow in North America? How can you tell species apart from each other, and from lookalikes? We will cover these topics and more! |
Speaker: Rachel Swenie is a mycologist with expertise in the macrofungi of eastern North America. She earned her PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from the University of Tennessee and is currently a Farlow Fellow at Harvard University.
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Thursday February 8, 2024 7:30pm
Yeasts: The Enormous Diversity of Single-Celled Fungi Most fungi are completely invisible to humans. While we love to admire beautiful mushrooms and other large fruiting bodies in the forest, entire communities of cryptic and microscopic fungi are living and growing under our feet. Single-celled fungi, also known as yeasts, are among these cryptic fungi. Because they are single-celled, we can't see them with our own eyes, and yet they exist in almost all environments on Earth. The single-celled growth form evolved several times from hyphal ancestors and is common worldwide, but yeasts' roles in ecosystems are often mysterious. In this talk, I will introduce you to the wonderful world of naturally-occurring yeasts; giving some historic context on how humans have been interacting with yeasts for thousands of years, before discussing what we do and don't know about yeast ecology in nature. Then I'll discuss my own work with yeasts: I work with yeasts in several natural New England habitats, including temperate forests and carnivorous plants. I am working to expand our knowledge of yeast ecology and evolution by focusing on how yeasts interact with other living things in nature. With this talk, I hope to give audience members a new appreciation for the mysterious and intriguing invisible fungal diversity they encounter every day. |
Speaker: Primrose Boynton is an assistant professor in Biology at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, USA. She received her PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2012, where she studied the diversity and ecology of yeasts in carnivorous pitcher plants. She went on to work at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, on the ecology and evolution of Saccharomyces species in their natural environments. She is broadly interested in what determines microbial fitness in natural environments, and uses the diversity of yeasts, with a focus on model organisms in nature, to understand yeast and microbial ecology and evolution.
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Sunday February 18, 2024 5pm
Myxomycetes at Black Sugarloaf, Northern Tasmania - A Slime Mo(u)ld Hotspot The taxonomic position of slime moulds has baffled naturalists and scientists for centuries. When “the father of taxonomy”, Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, devised his system of classification, he included slime moulds (and fungi) in the plant kingdom. Slime moulds were subsequently placed in various kingdoms but are now regarded as amoebozoans. Sarah Lloyd has observed slime moulds in a eucalypt forest at Birralee Tasmania for 13 years. It is now considered a hotspot for myxomycetes, with over 120 species documented from the site including 4 hitherto undescribed species, one new genus and more new species awaiting further study. In this webinar Sarah will discuss these and also describe the important ecological roles of slime moulds. |
Speaker: Sarah Lloyd has had a lifelong love of birds and, since 1988 when she moved to live in a forest at Black Sugarloaf, Birralee in central north Tasmania, an interest in plants, bryophytes, fungi and slime moulds. She has contributed to several citizen science projects including the Australian Bird Count, and Fungimap, a project to record Australia’s undocumented fungal species. It was through Fungimap that Sarah was introduced to slime moulds. In 2019 she was awarded an OAM (Order of Australia medal) for “services to conservation – and slime moulds”. She is the author of numerous books, including Where the Slime Moulds Creep (4th Edition, 2022).
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Thursday February 29th 2024 7:30pm
Diversity of Pluteus in North America We will present an overview of the taxonomy and distribution of the species of Pluteus in North America based on morphological studies and molecular phylogenies. A total of 120 taxa (species and varieties) of Pluteus have been described from or reported in North America, but currently only c. 40 of these species have been confirmed to occur here, based on molecular data generated from North American voucher collections. We will discuss the ongoing, collaborative projects to clarify the status of old names in the genus, and to describe a good number on new species, through a combination of morphological and molecular approaches and collaboration with citizen-scientists. |
Speaker: Alfredo Justo is Curator of Botany & Mycology at the New Brunswick Museum. Dr. Justo joined the Natural History Department of the New Brunswick Museum in June 2019. He oversees the curation and growth of the NBM Herbarium, which comprises over 100,000 specimens of plants, fungi, lichens, bryophytes and algae from New Brunswick and neighboring regions. His research focuses on the fungal diversity of New Brunswick & Atlantic Canada, while maintaining ongoing global taxonomic research on selected genera of mushrooms.
Dr. Justo completed his PhD in systematic mycology at the University of Vigo, Spain, in 2006. Following several years of projects in Spain related to mycological conservation and diversity, he spent six years (2009-2014) in a postdoctoral research position with Dr. David Hibbett at Clark University (Massachusetts, USA), focusing on molecular systematics of mushroom-forming fungi. Research and teaching positions followed, in Mexico, Spain, and eventually back to the USA where Dr. Justo was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Biology Department at Worcester State University and a Visiting Scholar at Clark University. More on Dr. Justo’s research interests & publications at https://alfredojusto.weebly.com/ |
Thursday March 14th 2024 7:30pm
Last Chance to Know? The Changing Biogeography of Mushrooms and The Death Cap in California As humans reshape Earth’s biodiversity, conservationists and the public worry about what will happen to animals and plants. But what about fungi? Mushrooms are also on the move, and movements are often mediated by commerce and trade. Humans brought the fungus Amanita phalloides to California, and it is now invasive. How did that happen and why is it spreading? |
Speaker: Anne Pringle was born in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and spent her childhood traveling through Southeast Asia and West Africa. After being dragged along on one-too-many birding expeditions, she abandoned the birds for fungi. She got her Ph.D. in Botany and Genetics at Duke University. After completing a Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, she joined the faculty at Harvard University. She next moved to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where she is now a Vilas Distinguished Achievement and the Mary Herman Rubinstein Professor in the Departments of Botany and Bacteriology. Pringle has given over 180 talks to academic and popular audiences in countries including China, Colombia, France, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. She has been awarded the Alexopoulos Prize for a Distinguished Early Career Mycologist (2010), the Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Harvard University Graduate Student Council (2011), the Fannie Cox Prize for Excellence in Science Teaching from Harvard University (2013), a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship (2011-2012), the Mid-Career Mycorrhiza Research Excellence Award from the International Mycorrhiza Society (2019), and a Fulbright U.S. Scholarship (2022-2023, taken to South Africa). She is a National Geographic Explorer. In 2019, Pringle was elected President of the Mycological Society of America. To see Pringle talk about fungi, invasion by death caps, and the microbiomes of pitcher plants, please visit ibiology. To read her publications and see her lab’s video about working with fungi please visit her laboratory
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SAVE THE DATE! - BELOW ARE ADDITIONAL UPCOMING 2024 LIVE ONLINE LECTURES
April 4th Damon Tighe
iNaturalist for the Community Scientist (to be confirmed)
April 14th Kaisa Junninen (SUNDAY)
Succession of Polypore Fungi Over 33 Years After Restoration Fire
April 25th (or April 28th) Martin Axegård
Ramaria in Northeastern North America
May 9th Robert Blanchette
Fungal Wonders of the Rotten World
May 19th Hans-Otto Baral (SUNDAY)
Orbiliomycetes
iNaturalist for the Community Scientist (to be confirmed)
April 14th Kaisa Junninen (SUNDAY)
Succession of Polypore Fungi Over 33 Years After Restoration Fire
April 25th (or April 28th) Martin Axegård
Ramaria in Northeastern North America
May 9th Robert Blanchette
Fungal Wonders of the Rotten World
May 19th Hans-Otto Baral (SUNDAY)
Orbiliomycetes
Last Updated: 2024-03-06