The red list of fungi in Poland

A red list and species protection answer different questions. A red list assesses disappearance risk in a defined area, while a regulation establishes legal prohibitions. A species may be severely threatened but unprotected, or protected despite a different threat category. The documents are not interchangeable.

Poland's larger-fungi red list was prepared by Władysław Wojewoda and Maria Ławrynowicz in 2006. Its authoritative digitisation, published by the Polish Mycological Society, contains 963 non-lichenised fungal records: 53 Ex, 425 E, 175 V, 270 R and 40 I. The previous “about 320” figure was wrong and did not describe the size of this checklist.

These are the historical categories used by the authors, not automatically current IUCN categories. Digitisation corrected typographic errors and aligned names with the GBIF backbone but did not reassess extinction risk. A record updated to a modern name still represents a 2006 assessment, not a recent population trend. The list excludes lichens and has no force of law.

Detectability remains incomplete. Fruit bodies appear briefly and not every year, while no observation may mean disappearance, unsuitable weather or nobody looking. Herbarium, publication and citizen-science data must be combined and verified. For an atlas user, a category should trigger care: do not pick a rare specimen merely for a photograph, do not automatically disclose its exact site, and record the habitat.