Welcome to the home page of the CNPQ Fellowship project Fungi of Brazil Described by Batista and Co-workers, which began in September 1992. In this project the enormous volume of information about Brazilian fungi described by the great Brazilian mycologist Augusto Batista was computerized. This website provides basic information about the project and its results, with links to further web-pages, including the resulting electronic database which may be consulted on the internet.
The number of fungal species worldwide is thought to be not fewer than 1.5 million, of which less than 5% have been described (Hawksworth, 1991). Of these most have been studied in northern temperate regions. In general, the fungi of the tropics remain poorly documented. This is particularly true for Brazil where, compared to the total likely fungal diversity, almost nothing is known. But even that "almost nothing" comprises a huge amount of valuable information scattered in a wide range of different literature sources. Many of these sources deal with fungi known only from, or first recorded from Brazil, and even a superficial scanning of this literature makes it clear that the number of different fungal species which occur in Brazil must be very large indeed.
Before any serious inventory or assessment of biodiversity can be undertaken in any region, access to existing data is essential. That means a checklist. Checklists are lists of particular groups of organisms from a region, with basic scientific information about the name of the organism, and where it was published, together with data on the systematic position of each organism, its frequency, known distribution, ecology and bibliographic references. No checklist of Brazilian fungi existed before the present project.
The literature on mycology in Brazil is extensive but very scattered. There is, however, a large core of information almost exclusively on this subject published between the early 1950s and early 1970s by a very active team of mycologists working in the Instituto de Micologia, Universidade de Recife under Prof. A.C. Batista. The results of the team's work were published in almost 700 individual papers, catalogued by Leal (1960) and Leal (1971) [and compiled for the internet by Minter & da Silva]. These comprise a numbered series named Publicações. Instituto de Micologia da Universidade do Recife. At the start of the current project this core of information was identified as a priority.
Starting with the collection of the Publicações. Instituto de Micologia da Universidade do Recife in the library of the International Mycological Institute, the papers published by this team were systematically scanned for observation on individual occurrences of fungi in Brazil. Full information about the database design and methods used can be found in the publication Da Silva & Minter (1995) [click here for details]. Full information about the more developed database design used in subsequent checklists is available in electronic form [Data structure for scientific names of living organisms; Data structure for biological recording]. Altogether over 4,600 different fungal names, representing more than 3,340 binomials and trinomials in over 1,160 different genera in more than 160 families were listed in the final output of the project. It may thus be the largest current single compilation of information about the fungi (in the broad traditional sense) of Brazil. In addition to associations between themselves, these fungi are associated with over 480 plant genera from more than 120 families, almost 20 animal genera from 12 families, and 7 protist genera from 7 families.
It must be stressed, however, that the current project's results summarize only a fraction of what has already been published about the fungi of Brazil. Compared with inventories from other regions, relative sizes of different fungal groups, and of groups of associated organism are clearly disproportionate. The high number of records of fungi occurring on other fungi, for example, can be explained by the interests of the research team on whose publications the current projects results were based. As a result, the present project's work cannot in any sense be described as a full checklist. It was merely an attempt, using computerized databases, to provide a first step towards a preliminary checklist of the fungi from Brazil.
References
 |
 |
|
|
Previous page
Biodiversity Website: home page | Author: D.W. Minter |