Fauna, flora and funga — a fight over one word

Conservation documents have long worked with the pair "fauna and flora". For most of the history of science fungi were counted as plants, so formally they sat within flora — and there they stayed in the language of law long after biology recognised them as a separate kingdom closer to animals than to plants.

The consequence is practical, not merely terminological. An act or a strategy that names fauna and flora has no column at all for organisms belonging to neither. A survey project written to fit such a document does not count fungi, because there is nowhere to record the result. Money follows the category.

In 2018 Francisco Kuhar, Giuliana Furci, Elisandro Drechsler-Santos and Donald Pfister published in IMA Fungus a proposal that the diversity of fungi in a given area be called "funga", exactly as fauna and flora describe animals and plants. The idea began at an informal meeting during the Latin American mycological congress, and the authors preceded it with a review of alternative terms, which they also discuss in the paper.

The "three Fs" proposal — fauna, flora and funga — was taken up faster than terminology usually is. Conservation organisations and international documents now use it, and since 2021 a campaign under that banner has pressed for fungi to be written into national biodiversity strategies.

It is worth noticing what the scientific work consisted of here: not a discovery, but tidying the language so that something can be spoken about in a document at all. It is a rare case of a single word being an instrument of conservation.

The word is an auditing tool

“Funga” means the fungal community of a particular region, habitat or period, parallel to fauna and flora. Kuhar and colleagues proposed the term in 2018 so inventories and plans would no longer hide fungi under “flora.” The change is useful when it produces separate data, expertise, indicators and action. In 2025 the IUCN World Conservation Congress approved Motion 091, requesting integration of fungi and invertebrates into protected-area objectives, setting a goal of 23,500 fungal assessments by 2030 and encouraging national strategies to include them. Neither an IUCN motion nor the word itself automatically creates legal protection. Conservation still requires named taxa, habitats, threats, funding and a responsible authority.