Systematics

Old man’s beard looking a bit sad (photo Jerry Cooper) Every year for the last 20 years I have gone to the annual FUNNZ fungal foray with colleagues and enthusiasts from around …

Manaaki Whenua is the custodian of almost a third of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Nationally Significant Databases and Collections. These include biological resources such as reference species collections, and are important scientific, cultural …

Hydora lanigera (photo Manaaki Whenua) We have few beetles in New Zealand that could be called truly aquatic but, what we do have includes the riffle beetles in the genus Hydora. With …

Display items from the PDD treasure chest (photo Manaaki Whenua). Did you know that we have our own national collection of fungi? The New Zealand Fungarium Te Kohinga Hekaheka o Aotearoa (PDD) …

New Zealand is a hotspot for Carex (a type of sedge) with 116 species. This is not far short of our biggest plant group, the hebes (Veronica), with 125 species.  The ancestor …

The King’s pouch fungus (photo Geoff Ridley) Back in 2012 I read about the half-life of facts. That is the period of time it takes for half the facts in a field …

When I first started out learning about the flora of Aotearoa New Zealand I bought three books, volume one and two of the “Flora of New Zealand” and the first edition of …

We have recently scanned and added to our database many historic images of bacterial plant pathogen diseases. The ICMP culture collection is very useful as a store of living cryo-preserved fungal and …

A box of my ascomycete specimens (photo Peter Johnston) The life of a field systematist revolves around trips into the field to collect a wide variety of organisms, in my case ascomycete …

Peter Johnston and David Hera, Mangapapa Conservation area Autumn might be the cold rainy month everyone hates, but for a group of mycologists it’s their favourite time of the year. Autumn means …