On the trail of a critically endangered fungus: A world-first application of wildlife detection dogs to fungal conservation.

Plant and animal conservation have benefited from the assistance of wildlife detection dogs (WDDs) since 1890, but their application to fungal conservation has not been trialed. In a world-first, we tested the effectiveness of WDDs and human surveyors when searching for experimentally outplanted fungi in natural habitat. We focused on a critically endangered fungus from Australia, and showed that a WDD outperformed a human surveyor: our WDD detected a greater proportion of targets, had a faster time to first discovery, and had fewer false negatives.

Fungal Planet description sheets: 1284-1382.

Novel species of fungi described in this study include those from various countries as follows: , from coastal sea sand. , on soil, on dead wood, from roots and leaves of and from capsules of , (incl. gen.

Fire regime, not time-since-fire, affects soil fungal community diversity and composition in temperate grasslands.

Frequent burning is commonly undertaken to maintain diversity in temperate grasslands of southern Australia. How burning affects below-ground fungal community diversity remains unknown. We show, using a fungal rDNA metabarcoding approach (Illumina MiSeq), that the fungal community composition was influenced by fire regime (frequency) but not time-since-fire.

Surrogates for macrofungi and mosses in reservation planning.

Our knowledge of cryptogam taxonomy and species distributions is currently too poor to directly plan for their conservation. We used inventory data from four distinct vegetation types, near Hobart Tasmania, to address the proposition that vegetation type, vascular plant taxon composition, and environmental variables can act as surrogates for mosses and macrofungi in reservation planning. The four vegetation types proved distinct in their taxon composition for all macrofungi, mosses, and vascular plants.