It’s the season (in the northern hemisphere), and I’ve noticed over the years that the “yields” are decreasing in some places while in other places they remain constant. It’s hard to find data on iNat to assess the population of edible mushrooms and see any trend. Naturally, there are certainly man…

As far as I know there isn’t. It would be a very difficult thing to research because the fruits are so finicky about appearing. Genetic testing of soil samples could prove which mycelium are still present, but even that wouldn’t tell us why some of them haven’t fruited well in years. Nor would it…

Indeed. I guess there is no data available on how many mushrooms are harvested every year. Without that, not much to go by…

For the vast majority of mushrooms, doesn’t the mycelium live on and produce next year’s crop? So the negative effect of mushrooms not surviving long enough to produce spores will be more on the dispersal of the fungus to new sites rather than a decline in mushroom production in the place of origin. …

Yes, the same mycelium produces next year’s crop, but some are fairly short lived and don’t spread easily. We are worried about the next hundred years’ crop. Particularly with fungi that feed exclusively on dead wood, the mycelium dies when it finishes digesting it’s food source, unless there happ…

There are studies out there. https://andrewsforest.oregonstate.edu/sites/default/files/lter/pubs/pdf/pub2487.pdf https://modern-forager.com/sustainable-mushroom-picking/

[image] roadside_rambler: Now, 2,000 people a year each find 5 measly mushrooms out there, and go home complaining about the poor crop, even though the woods is still producing it’s magic quota of 10,000. True… this is indeed an useful bias to actually be aware of. That’s why I was thinking i…

Great! Many thanks for posting the links. I’ll go through them.

Thanks for sharing those. The Oregon chanterelle study linked to on the modern-forager site was a very interesting read. It pointed out a challenge I hadn’t thought of - the difficulty in accurately measuring biomass in the unharvested control plots without, you know, harvesting them. …

Assessing any factor individually is quite a daunting endeavour in itself, but perhaps citizen science could help a bit. Although it seems unlikely that people harvesting mushrooms will willingly share much about their finds in an accurate manner. Perhaps time would be better spent in pedagogical a…

Sustainable mushrooms harvest

Nature Talk

jhbratton December 21, 2025, 10:24pm 11

Maybe squirrels are the culprits in this case?

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Sustainable mushrooms harvest

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