UK FungusDay Events

Go to our facebook events page for news of planned UK fungus day events. Events would normally have taken place at major sites including botanic gardens, museums, National Trust sites and other nature sites around the UK and Ireland on the weekend of UK Fungus Day. However 2020 will need to be different!

What will UK Fungus Day involve?

Ordinarily there would be a host of public engagement activities involving science and the arts run concurrently across the UK to introduce the general public to the wonders of the Fungal Kingdom. Unfortunately in 2020, due the current Covid-19 situation, all outdoor events and actvities have been cancelled at this time. We are looking to add ideas and suggestions for activities that can be engaged with online and in your own gardens. These are currently under development and we would urge you to review the UK Fungus Day website regularly in the next few months.

Why are we doing it?

Without the recycling activities of fungi the world’s ecosystems would soon run out of nutrients. Plants without their fungal mycorrhizal partners to deliver water and nutrients, would not be able to grow and food would quickly become depleted. Life on Earth would not exist without fungi!

However, fungi are emerging as pathogens across diverse taxa including humans, frogs, bats, soft coral and bees and in certain cases are causing widespread population decline. They cause invasive infections which contribute to high mortality rates in individuals suffering from AIDS and cancer and cause irritating superficial infections of our skin and mucous membranes. They can even poison us.

But in fact, few fungi actually cause a nuisance to the healthy individual yet without fungi, animals and plants could not and would not exist.

We therefore need to emphasise how crucially important fungi are to life on this planet!