Introduction

Until recently, nature conservation in The Netherlands has focused on the protection of plants and birds; management plans for nature reserves contain no measures aiming at maintenance or improvement of the mycota. The reasons for this were mainly practical: although a great deal is known about the distribution, ecology and management of higher plants and birds, there is hardly any knowledge concerning fungi. However, site management that is good for birds and higher plants is not necessarily beneficial for other groups of organisms, such as insects or fungi. Moreover, sites with valuable vegetation are not necessarily rich in fungi, and sites with an abundance of very rare fungi can occur among vegetation of little interest.

Since the Dutch Mycological Society started a project for the recording of macrofungi in 1980, much more information about the distribution and ecological preferences of fungi has become available. The Dutch Mycological Society's database now contains more than a million records. However, the data are not of direct use to managers of nature reserves. The data must be filtered and interpreted to be of practical value.

In an attempt to raise interest in mycota in conservation management plans the Dutch Mycological Society organised a meeting entitled ‘Fungi and Nature Conservation, Implications for Management’ in 1993, to which nature managers were also invited (Kuyper, 1994).