Welcome to Midwest Fungi Finds!

This site is intended to help document the species sequenced by the Ohio Mushroom DNA Lab and other sequencing projects throughout North America. Primarily, our focus is on Ohio but you will see representations of species found in other states as more collections are made and sequenced from those areas.

This site is not intended to be a comprehensive identification source or an authority on what mushrooms are edible or poisonous in an area - if you are looking for that information, there are better resources out there. Instead, this is meant as a complement to iNaturalist and Mycomap, primarily to help demystify temp codes applied to sequences, but also to help catalogue what described species have been genetically shown to be present in which state.

This is a work in progress, so bear with me! I'll do my best to keep it updated, but things may slip through the cracks.

About Temp Codes & Provisional Names

The temp codes you will see on this site are used as a convenient way to cluster similar fungal sequences together; they allow us to group similar specimans in a way that makes it easy to observe the variations in morphology. Grouping sequences under temp codes this way allows for more specificity than traditional methods of marking unsure specimans like the aff. or cf. notations would allow for.

For example, you might have two red-capped, spicy russula that get sequenced and come back with no good matches to any other sequence, including each other; you could label them both as Russula cf. emetica, but that wouldn't allow you to tell at a glance that there is a difference between the two specimans. Assigning separate temp codes to both specimans does allow for this though.

A temp code does not indicate that a species is undescribed; rather, it indicates that we lack sufficient reference sequences in the database to connect a sequence to a species confidently. As more museum holotypes are sequenced, it can be expected that many temp codes will end up being replaced with their true species designation.

Provisional names are a little more solid than temp codes - these are generally assigned for species that someone is in the process of describing that hasn't been officially published. On this site and iNaturalist, you'll usually see this indicated with a species name in parentheses, though a more official notation is nom. prov. or nomen provisorium.

Basidiomycetes