Please join us for SOMA’s first annual meeting of the season at the Sebastopol Grange welcoming Damon Tighe with his presentation on using iNaturalist to identify mushrooms with a particular focus on urban species.

Sebastopol Grange. 6000 Sebastopol Ave.

Doors open at 530. Potluck around 6pm. Presentation around 645pm.

Learning to identify mushrooms can be a slow process. Books, fungus fairs, and guided outings have traditionally been the best way to learn. iNaturalist, a free app that was developed in the Bay Area, has emerged as a wonderful learning tool. Further. iNat has become the largest community science project in the world documenting species biogeography! This talk will cover how to use the platform to get the most out of it and how to contribute to our global understating of fungal biodiversity. And since it’s September and urban mushrooms are starting to emerge, we will also do a tour, using iNaturalist data, of common urban mushrooms. 

Damon Tighe is a biotechnologist and naturalist in the San Francisco Bay Area who first became interested in mushrooms because he ran out of food on a 350 km hike in California's Sierra Nevada mountains; he saw plenty of mushrooms, but didn't have the confidence to eat them. Previously, he worked on the human genome project, single cell sequencing, and now works for Bio-Rad Laboratories supporting teachers in bringing modern biology techniques into their classrooms. He has been involved in community science efforts to DNA barcode fungi for over a decade, is well-known in the mycological community and has helped as a teacher at SOMA Camp as well!