Bondarwezia loguerciae (Bondarwezia loguerciae) Case Study
Home > Biodiversity Nature & People > Conservation Philanthropy > Grants > MBZF Grant 242533800
Continent: South America
Country: Brazil
Grant Amount: $18,000
Awarded Date: June 03, 2024
Elisandro Ricardo Drechsler dos Santos
MIND.Funga Research Group (Federal University of Santa Catarina)
Rua Hipólito Mafra, 203, apto 104C
Florianópolis
Santa Catarina
88045-410
Brazil
Tel: +55 48 3721 2889
Mob: +55 48 99626 8188
Qualifying fungal conservation: Accelerating the Brazilian Funga conservation and extinction risk assessment through AI-based habitat models and IUCN guidelines.
Despite being diverse and essential for ecosystem health, the Brazilian funga is neglected. Its conservation is incipient, with 0.43% of known species assessed. Extinction risk assessments using IUCN criteria rely on a demanding process of species selection and data gathering. By joining expertise in species assessment with gold-standard AI algorithms applied to fungal HSMs, the grant will significantly accelerate the species selection step via quantification of habitat suitability probability and its changes in the future, allowing directing assessment efforts to pre-selected species. The use of HSMs in fungal conservation will also be innovative, enabling the use of criteria that rely on distribution patterns, which are currently not widely applied to fungi due to imprecision in inferences based only on expert knowledge. The grant will also focus on the use of HSMs to already assessed highly threatened species, such as Bondarzewia loguerciae, to validate the current assessments based on unused criteria and make targeted efforts in areas of high suitability to collect and preserve the species' genetic diversity in-vitro. This grant will join efforts with and benefit from the MBZF project 222530589, which established the first Brazilian culture collection exclusively dedicated to preserving threatened fungal species' genetic diversity.
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