Fungus Flora of Tropical Africa, the Myxomycetes Volumes

The Botanic Garden Meise (Belgium) has contributed to the knowledge of African Fungi almost from its early beginnings in 1870, when the institute was the Botanic Garden of the State. This was and is still done by conducting field work in Africa followed by scientific research and ultimately chairing discoveries through international publications. From 1935 until 1972 the Botanic Garden Meise published 17 volumes of the “Flore iconographique des Champignons du Congo”. This was followed by the “Flore illustrée des champignons d'Afrique centrale" of which 17 volumes have been published between 1972 and 1997. In this illustrated flora the myxomycetes featured in three volumes; one genus Diderma and three orders Echinosteliales, Trichiales and Stemonitales were covered (Rammeloo 1981, Buyck & Rammeloo 1983).In 2007 the series “Fungus Flora of Tropical Africa” was initiated and up to now three volumes have been published. Each volume contains information on methodology, identification keys, species descriptions, distribution data and color plates of the treated taxa. In 2014 the initiative was taken to prepare a monograph of the Myxomycetes recorded in tropical Africa, the region between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The checklist of myxomycetes in Africa (Ndiritu et al. 2009) recorded 294 taxa, was used as basis for this new monograph. After omitting the records from the countries situated outside the tropical region, then adding recent data from papers on La Réunion and Madagascar (Adamonite et al. 2011; Wrigley de Basanta et al. 2012) and records of the herbaria BR and GENT, a list of 321 taxa remained. Of course, this is not a definite number, query for additional records is being carried out through contacting local mycologists and herbaria. Even the current total it is too extensive for one volume. Therefore it was decided to produce at least 4 volumes. Currently the volume covering the orders Ceratiomyxales, Echinosteliales and Liceales, comprising about 60 species, is in preparation. We aim to give as much information as possible to illustrate the variability of each taxon through elaborate species descriptions and sufficient images. In this poster we present a selected number of pages from the final publication.

Publication year:2017