Campaign Wrap-Up and a Special Announcement

 

At 11:59:59 PM Pacific Standard Time, January 29th 2018, this campaign came to a triumphant close. We raised $5008 (before fees), with over $1000 of additional donations made outside the campaign and more continuing to come in by the day. The initial goal of $4500 was met only ten days past the starting line, and the final, unofficial tally is high enough to have met our stretch goal as well.

The campaign was featured on our favorite art and design blog, Colossal, to an audience of millions:

www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/ecuadorian-fungi/

followed by a segment on ESPN showing four Los Cedros fungi photos to an audience of many millions more:

http://www.espn.com/watch/player?id=3245277

The tissue samples are almost ready and will be sent for sequencing before I return to New York. Both light and scanning electron micrographs have been generated for several "special" collections, and will continue to be performed on more material over time. We have obtained a block of accession numbers for deposit at the Oregon State University Herbarium, where our collections will be available to researchers for generations to come. Official loans are already being arranged to match specialists with the collections pertaining to their particular area of interest.

Meanwhile, a team of researchers lead by Dr. Bitty Roy recently assembled and published the first comprehensive checklist of endangered species known from those areas of the Ecuadorian Andes implicated in the government's latest mining concessions. The section on Los Cedros highlights 163 such species, with mention of ongoing and future research on the reserve's fungi.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2018/01/22/251538.full.pdf

And on January 24th, to ensure that such future research would indeed become a reality, the National Geographic Society informed us of their decision to fund our 2017 grant proposal to explore the yet uncharted reaches of Reserva Los Cedros:

 

Over the course of approximately one month, Roo, Dan Thomas and myself will join an international team of botanists, mycologists, entomologists, primatologists, herpetologists, and ornithologists to characterize both the diversity and ecology of the organisms we encounter, a great many of which are expected to be new to science. Travel will take place sometime later this year. The expedition itself and/or its outcomes may become the subject of one or more National Geographic media products, including (but not limited to) film, television, or a feature piece in National Geographic Magazine.

The sum of all these successes have left Roo and I speechlessly inspired. A fraction of this amount of good news in the span of a single month would have been sufficient to celebrate. This not only gives us hope for our own research, but for fungal systematics and collections-based research at large, where good news is so regularly in such short supply.

For as long as Experiment.com allows us to, we will continue to post updates here on our progress. We hope you'll check in from time to time to see some of the fruits of this beautiful labor. Thank you to everyone who helped to make this campaign not just possible, but something we never could have imagined. This is, in every way, just the beginning.

Yours in Spores,

-Danny & Roo