Grassland fungi to-do

While the fungi grassland survey season may now be over we are really just starting on the office part of this project. The current phase of the project is making further use of data to help generate predictive models which we can test and refine to help us better predict the location of species and good grassland fungi sites across the whole of Lancashire. Lancashire is a large county and much of it is in private ownership. Predictive models can use the known location of species along with how they coincide with information on things like terrain, land-use, and climate. To extrapolate across the whole of the county and predict whether or not a species is likely to occur in similar conditions elsewhere.

To do this we are following a series of steps. The first of which has been to collate your observations, along with those collected by other field work and shared by other specialist groups. This has allowed us to create a species dataset for Lancashire.

We then identified a series of environmental datasets which could be considered as factors in the prediction of whether or not a species might occur at any given location. Broadly, this included Climate variables from HadUK, Digital Terrain Model (DTM) derived terrain, slope, and aspect. Detailed soils data, historical and current agricultural land use classifications and detailed wide habitat information.

Together this information is allowing us to begin to test the best predictors for fungi grassland presence so that we may be able to target future surveys with better accuracy or create ‘alert maps’ which can warn planners and conservationists where as yet undiscovered good fungi grasslands might be found.

The iNaturalist Lancashire Waxcap Project can be found here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/lancashire-waxcaps/