Fungi for Function is our grant-funded 3 year citizen science research project in South Australia, delivered in collaboration with 12 wonderful project partners. The research seeks to establish whether 28 distinctive target species within key fungi functional groups are effective indicators of ecosystem condition in our native bushland. To do this we are conducting systematic surveys of fungi at 10 stringybark bushland sites on Kaurna, Peramangk, and Ramindjeri/Ngarrindjeri country, with half the sites in good condition and half in poor condition.

We had a successful survey season through June, July and August, thanks to the help of more than 100 citizen scientists who turned up to our 20 survey days across the 10 sites!

Despite ongoingly dry conditions, we ended up finding 3,128 instances of our target species across the 48 survey plots, spread across 23 different target species within all four functional groups. We generated 2,116 records on iNaturalist. And we had a lot of fun doing it!

Some of our other achievements of the year were:

• collaborating on a fungi workshop with the River Murray Mallee Aboriginal Corporation (together with project partners Murraylands Riverland Landscape Board);
• continuing to developing an education module for primary and high school students and trialling it in schools (together with project partners Murraylands Riverland Landscape Board);
• publishing our booklet of target species which was well received and will be used ongoingly in the region;
• our Project Coordinator Sophie Green presented as key guest speaker at the Friends of Parks & Nature Awards Night, sharing the importance of fungi with many amazing bush carers.

For a full project update, please click here.

We thank everyone for their involvement, hard work, enthusiasm, and support of this project, and look forward to our final year of surveys in 2026!

If you’d like to get involved, please contact Sophie at fungiforfunction[at]gmail.com