The MycoMap BC Project was funded in part by a grant from the Metchosin Foundation. Launched in the fall of 2025, the Project has been a huge help in the survey of fungal species in Metchosin.
The MycoMap Project encourages iNaturalist users to not only record observations of fungal species, but also to collect and dry them (“voucher” them) and to submit the dried specimens for sequencing. The barcode area of the fungus’s DNA is read and matched to databases of the barcodes, with the result that–in most cases–the exact species of the vouchered observations can be determined.
Before the BC MycoMap Project started, only about 30 different mushroom vouchers from Metchosin had been sequenced. In the last six months, fourteen people working within the project have submitted 845 more Metchosin vouchers for sequencing. Of these, just under half (about 400) had already been sequenced by the beginning of May 2026.
Determining the exact species of any mushroom usually involves some guessing–they can be quite hard to ID to exact species. Sequencing removes a lot of this guessing, putting fungal identification on a par with some other groups, such as vascular plants. As a result of this sequencing, we currently have secure records for 234 different species within the District. INaturalist records of these sequenced species can be viewed here.
Almost 37 of these 250 species have turned out to the first iNaturalist records from BC of those species. Some, in fact, were the first evidence of the fungal barcode ever found and could easily become, after they are formally described, entirely new species.
Here are a few of the more exciting finds (click on pictures to see the iNaturalist records):
