Introduction

For rather more than a year, the specialist group for fungi within the Species Survival Commission (SSC) of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has been revived after interruption in its activities between 1995 and 1998. As a member of the European Council for the Conservation of Fungi (ECCF) standing committee, I shared with my ECCF colleagues the regret that fungi were no longer taken into account within the IUCN. So we decided to take advantage of the June 1998 Planta Europa meeting, in Uppsala, to establish new contacts with the IUCN and to revive this specialist group.

Within the new specialist group for fungi, the ECCF serves as the main framework since it has accumulated much data and experience on the topic since 1984. But I am also trying to federate further mycologists involved in conservation outside Europe so that the group will consist of a genuinely enlarged and international network.

In this chapter I will give a brief description of the present global state of knowledge concerning fungal conservation and indicate the main priorities we should consider for the future. Of course, this owes a great deal to the ECCF heritage, especially through the decisive contributions from some of its members, such as Eef Arnolds and others. I also received feedback from some members of the new group but I do not claim that the literature survey is in any way exhaustive and I do realise that some points may not be represented here.