**4. Fungal conservation**

Although fungi are cryptic and understudied organisms, there has been increasing concern regarding their conservation. As with many other organisms, fungi are affected by habitat loss, pollution, climate change, and other environmental factors. Overall fungi have no legal protection and the potential decline in fungal diversity, affecting both known and unknown species, has been a major concern among mycologists. The main reason underlying the lack of fungal conservation protocols is the challenge in gathering data on fungal populations and geographic distributions. For the most part, conservation bodies, such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), rely on data describing distributions, population size and population trends to assign threat categories to species (IUCN Standards and Petitions Subcommittee, 2010). These criteria make it very difficult to apply such categories to fungi.

Nevertheless, there have been efforts to gather fungal checklists and flag species of concern with red lists, particularly among European countries. One of the most relevant initiatives has been the European Council for the Conservation of Fungi (ECCF, currently the conservation group at the European Mycological Association), created in 1985 and aimed at promoting awareness about conservation of fungi, stimulating studies and publications on fungal distributions and fungal red lists, as well as promoting international collaborations towards the compilation of a European red list of threatened fungi (http://www.wsl.ch/eccf/). In the early 2000s, ECCF submitted a list of 33 threatened fungi in Europe to be included in the Bern Convention (Dahlberg & Croneborg, 2003). This report referred to rare European macrofungal species and, for the first time, aspired to obtain continental-level legal protection for fungi. This attempt was however unsuccessful, with the Bern Convention rejecting the proposal.

More recently, the International Society for the Conservation of Fungi was established specifically with the goal of protecting fungi worldwide (Minter, 2010, Williams, 2010; http://www.fungal-conservation.org). This is the first society devoted exclusively to the conservation of fungi and aims at developing actions on four fronts: infrastructure, science, education, and politics. The political aspect is regarded as a particularly important target, as the society plans to develop and lobby for fungal conservation policies worldwide.

Hopefully the recent genomic and metagenomic developments and all the multitude of new possibilities they open for fungal research, will contribute for the development of specific

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