10 Years of Barcoding NZ Basidios

This is a presentation I was to give at the 2023 Fungal Foray in Rotorua. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to make the foray. For over 10 years we have barcode-sequenced numerous selected collections to build-up our knowledge of the fungi of New Zealand. Many of those collections have come from fungal forays. The data contributes to a national reference database to facilitate sequence-based identification and provides the baseline data for describing new species and revising existing names. It tells us what we identify correctly, and what we misidentify; it tells us what we have in New Zealand, and what we probably got wrong. The project has revealed large numbers of undescribed species (>50%), with many cryptic species-complexes. It shows that identifications based on older are often incorrect, with over 50% misidentified on average. In this presentation I will give a summary of the current status of this long-term project as it applies to the fungal order Agaricales

Update August 2023: I have added a list of agaric species described from New Zealand for which we don't have a candidate barcode sequence. It is a priority to re-find these species.