Poland is first in Europe to protect fungi

In 1983 Polish legislation brought selected larger fungi under species protection. The regulation of the Minister of Forestry and the Timber Industry of 30 April listed 21 rare species and introduced prohibitions on taking and destroying them. It was the first national recognition in Europe, on this scale, of fungi as an independent subject of species protection.

A legal act has to be read in the circumstances of its own time. The list of names matched the taxonomy of the day, and later research changed some combinations and species boundaries. Subsequent regulations extended or amended the lists and introduced the distinction between strict and partial protection. Today's rules should therefore not be derived directly from the 1983 list.

The present basis is the 2014 regulation on the species protection of fungi. It also covers lichens, because the fungal partner determines their classification. Legal protection and a red list are not the same thing: the first establishes prohibitions, the second assesses the risk of disappearance. A species may appear in one and not in the other.

The significance of the 1983 decision was greater than the number 21. The law stopped treating fungi merely as forest produce to be used, or as diseases of trees, and recognised that rare species have a conservation value of their own. For a present-day picker the history leads to a practical rule: check the current list, do not pick unidentified specimens, and remember that even an old atlas may use a name different from the act in force.

Pioneering fungal protection inside a “plant” regulation

The regulation was signed on 30 April, published on 20 May, and under §8 entered into force on 1 June 1983. In §1, entries 88–97 placed macrofungi under complete protection. Those are ten numbered entries, but some cover whole families or pairs of species; an official Wigry National Park account totals them as 21 species and identifies the measure as Europe’s first of its kind. The act extended beyond a protected list: §2 prohibited destroying fruiting bodies of fungi not gathered for food and disturbing forest litter while searching for edible mushrooms. Its title exposes the period’s legal taxonomy—it introduced “species protection of plants” even though fungi and lichens appeared in the lists.