Data is Not the Destination: Community Science and the Future of Fungi with Christian Schwarz

Christian Schwarz – Keynote Speaker

What are the roles of aesthetics, spirituality, and community in the process of science? What are the most important realms of science in a rapidly destabilizing world? How can we incorporate more abstract experiences and motivations into a paradigm of sustained, iterative knowledge-making and communication? Where might our practices lead us beyond the bounds of mere data? How have fungi shaped our ideas about the nature and practice of community science (for better and worse), and where might they lead us from here? We’ll discuss all this and more.

Appetizers provided; drinks available for purchase.

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 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List Working Group for 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 History at UC Santa Cruz, where he has taught undergraduate courses in mycology and community science.