MEETINGS AND ACTIVITIES

Meeting 2: Building a microarray for identification of fungi in the environment (Held with UNITE near Copenhagen, Denmark, Fall 2007 please see meeting talks and summary)

The second meeting will establish a working relationship between North American and European mycologists for purposes of designing and building a fungal microarray. The genetic similarity of many European and North American fungal taxa and the fact that many North American fungal names are based on European types makes this collaboration absolutely essential. For this meeting only, participants from the United States will be selected on the basis of their expertise in molecular ecology or microarray design.

Focal Questions

	Which taxa and ecological groups are the most critically underrepresented in GenBank?
	What level of identification can we achieve with the existing data?
	What is the appropriate array technology?

Specific goals

	Identifying appropriate technology.
	Assembling a consortium to reduce the cost of array production.
	Outlining a plan to build it.

Meeting 3: Connecting sequence data with the ecology of taxa (Mycological Society of America 2009)

Focal Questions

	How can cyberinfrastructure efficiently link, curate, and validate large quantities of web- based information for use in fungal ecology?
	Can ecological characteristics be predicted by phylogeny and thus serve to inform ecologists about the potential niche of an unidentified organism or do critical physiological and ecological within even closely related lineages?

Specific goals

	To develop strategies for acquiring and retrieving ecological knowledge on fungal taxa.
	To develop strategies for retrieval of taxon-based information from databases for ecology, mycology, and molecular biology.
	To identify major ecological patterns in fungal evolution.

Workshops: Web-based resources for ecologists and mycologists (GBIF, NBII, iSpecies, Fungal culture collections, herbaria, etc.)

Meeting 4: Ecological genetics in the -omic era: genomes, proteomes, and fungal ecology (Ecological Society of America 2010)

Focal questions

	What are the untapped opportunities provided by fungal genomic data for ecologists?
	What types of ecological interactions can be assessed with genomic data?
	What are the holes in current genomic data for fungi?
	How can fungal ecologists inform the selection of particular taxa for sequencing?

Specific goals

	To introduce mycologists and ecologists to the ways in which genomic data can be used to address ecological questions.
	To identify the fungal genomes that are relevant for particular ecological questions.
	To identify fungi that are not yet sequenced that would provide unique opportunities for ecological research.
	To develop linkages between ecological studies and biotechnological advances.

Workshops

	Bioinformatics for ecologists and mycologists
	Ongoing grant programs for genome sequencing

Meeting 5: Fungal Ecology: cultivating a new generation of fungal ecologists (Mycological Society of America 2011)

Focal Questions

	How can we more effective use the informed public for fungal surveys?
	How can we reach pre-college students to foster an interest in fungal ecology?
	How can we make fungal ecology more accessible to the general public?

Specific goals

	To develop better ways to include amateurs in ecological research
	To develop and make available course content in fungal ecology for high school and undergraduate teaching.
	To coordinate and facilitate the building of web-base guides for fungal identification.

Workshops

	Learning from past and ongoing mycological surveys: the roles of amateur mycologists
	Fungal ecology in the high school classroom
	Building web-based guides about fungi

	To identify gaps in current sequence databases, and to mount a community-wide effort to generate sequence data from types and other vouchered specimens.
	To design and recommend nomenclatural standards for environmental sequences, and unidentified fungi.
	To codify and develop strategies for curating environmental samples, and data derived from them.
	To recommend genes for barcoding species/identifying taxa to the community