Bondarwezia loguerciae (Bondarwezia loguerciae)

Mohamed bin Zayed Species project number 242533800

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.