The mycological collections of Luomus in Helsinki

The Finnish Museum of Natural History, Luomus, holds three and a half million plant and fungal specimens. The herbarium operates under the international code H and runs to about three million three hundred thousand specimens, with the Finnish lichen and moss collections among the three largest in the world.

The mycological part alone amounts to some five hundred thousand specimens. Its structure says a good deal about where the Finnish research tradition lies. The largest single section is Finnish Aphyllophorales, at ninety thousand specimens. Second come the agarics, at seventy-five thousand. To these are added microfungi from historical collections — material gathered at a time when most of those organisms had no name yet.

The aphyllophoroid fungi deserve a sentence of their own, because this is not a group anybody collects in passing. Polypores, corticioid and stereoid fungi grow on dead wood, demand work under a microscope, and rarely end up in a basket. Ninety thousand specimens from one country means decades of systematic field work in forests where dead wood survived at all.

The botanical and mycological collections are more than a herbarium. Luomus also keeps living collections in two botanic gardens and a seed bank of endangered species, and the collection services cover preparation, deposition, digitisation and loans of scientific specimens. Structured light 3D scanning is provided on request.

The botany and mycology unit, together with the plant museum, works at Kaisaniemenranta 2 in Helsinki, beside the Kaisaniemi botanic garden. The second garden, at Kumpula, sits at Jyrängöntie 2.

The collection grows faster than its image coverage

Luomus describes just under 500,000 fungal specimens: around 90,000 Finnish aphyllophoroid fungi and 75,000 agarics, with close to 5,000 items added annually. Of an estimated 5,000 types, about 3,500 had been digitised. The gap among the physical whole, catalogue and images means that no photograph in FinBIF does not prove no material exists. The holdings are especially strong in Fennoscandia but also reflect historic expeditions and international exchange. Stores are not open for casual browsing; research visits, loans and sampling are arranged with staff. Luomus public exhibitions are a separate service and do not present a representative cross-section of the fungarium.