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Searching the Species Fungorum database

Searching the Species Fungorum database works best if you have ‘cookies’ enabled on your browser. Disabling cookies will stop you from navigating between pages of records and traversing the taxonomic hierarchy.

You can explore the Species Fungorm data through a taxonomic lookup by species or epithet, a taxonomic lookup by genus and higher ranks via the classification hierarchy, or by traversing the fungal tree of life.

When searching species, start by selecting 'Name' (the default selection) and entering the name or select 'Epithet' and enter the epithet (both specific and infraspecific epithets are searched together). Your entry can be right-truncated (do not add a * or % to the end of the search string - we will do that for you), e.g. ‘Agaricus am’ will find all names within the genus ‘Agaricus’, where the first two letters of the epithet start with ‘am’.

From the results list, you can click on a name view the taxonomic record. If there is a Current name for a particular result, you can click it to view the synonomy. Links for the Parent taxon will take you to the fungal hirerarchy search for that family name.

The taxonomic lookup searches restrict you to 6000 records, so if you enter something as vague as ‘A’ you will not get all the records – try and be a bit more specific. The restriction is sufficient to return all records for the largest genus (Lecidea), if you really want to scroll through 30 pages of results, or the most common epithet. Please be kind to our server and be specific, literally!

When searching the fungal hierarchy, clicking then name of a genus will open up further details for that genus. For all higher taxonomic ranks, clicking the name will open up the fungal tree of life at that point.

The fungal tree of life will let you walk down from higher taxonomic ranks to genera and species. Click on the taxon name to see the lower level taxa. The fungal Tree of Life will only return classifications for genera that contain one accepted species or synonym. If a genus includes synonym species, indicate these by adding ‘(Synonym)’ in the label.