Christian Schwarz

Dichotomous Keys… Love them or hate them, they are one of the most powerful tools for identifying unknown organisms (not just mushrooms!) and structuring your knowledge so that when someone asks you how you recognize a species, you know *why* you know.

With an emphasis on hands-on examination of fresh mushroom specimens, we’ll work through some of the dichotomous keys in David Arora’s magnum opus Mushrooms Demystified; and contrast them to a few other styles of identification, including the Mushrooms of Cascadia (MoC) Method, as well as synoptic keys, iNaturalist machine vision, and technical literature.

Christian has been teaching this content to groups of all ages for more than a decade, and has seen all the common pitfalls that snare and entangle new identifiers. With his instruction you’ll soon become a confident traveler on the long road that is mushroom identification!

About the speaker:
Christian Schwarz is an itinerant naturalist from California. He studied Ecology and Evolution at UC Santa Cruz, where his interest in the world of fungi became irrevocable. Although he is passionate about ecology and biodiversity in general, Christian has primarily worked as a field mycologist. He has co-authored two field guides — Mushrooms of the Redwood Coast and Mushrooms of Cascadia, both with Noah Siegel. He primarily spends his time seeking, photographing, collecting, teaching about, and publishing research on North American macrofungi, and has served on theInternational Union for the Conservation of Nature‘ (IUCN) Red List Working Groupfor North American Fungi, an international membership and civil society organization that is the global authority on the status of the natural world and the measures needed to safeguard it. He is a research associate of the Ken Norris Center for Natural Historyat UC Santa Cruz, where he has taught undergraduate courses in mycology and community science.