Agaricales of the Hawaiian Islands

	I am the Principal Investigator on the National Science Foundation project to
document the Agaricales of the Hawaiian Islands.  Currently I am an Associate
Professor in the Dept. of Biology at San Francisco State University, and Director of
the H. D. Thiers Herbarium.  I have been interested in agarics and boletes for well
over 40 years, ever since my Swiss grandparents took me in the field at 3 years old
to collect Boletus edulis , Cantharellus formosus  and Agaricus campestris .  They
of course told me that all other mushrooms were poisonous and should not be
touched, which only piqued my curiosity.  My main research interests are in the
systematics of fleshy holobasidiomycetes, especially those of the Hawaiian Islands,
Pacific Northwest and Indonesia, and in the phylogeny of marasmioid fungi. 	

	Dr. George Wong, on the left, is an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Botany at
the University of Hawaii, Manoa.  George's main research focus is on the biology and
systematics of heterobasidiomycetes, and for this project he has concentrated on the
Gasteromycetes of the Hawaiian Islands.  Dr. Don Hemmes, on the right, is Professor
of Biology at the University of Hawaii, Hilo.  Don has been interested in Hawaiian
fungi for many years and is the principal collector on this project.  He has set up
long-term sampling transects in several montane native forests on Hawai`i and
monitors the plots every two weeks throughout the year.  We now have data
collected over three years on the frequency of occurrence of native Hawaiian agarics
thanks to Don's efforts.  He also happens to be a world expert on Hawaiian seashells
and one hell of a table tennis player!		

	Dr. Robert "Gil" Gilbertson, on the left, is Professor in the Dept. of Plant
Pathology at the University of Arizona.  Gil is studying the wood-rotting
hymenomycetes of the Hawaiian Islands.  He has been collecting the polypores and
corticioid fungi of the Islands for many years and has accompanied us on several
expeditions.  Like his tomes on North American and European Polypores (co-
authored with Ryvarden), we should soon see similar volumes on these fungi as
represented in the Hawaiian mycota.  Dr. Jack Rogers, on the right, is Professor and
Chair of the Dept. of Plant Pathology at Washington State University.  He is currently
working on the systematics of worldwide Xylariaceae, and we were fortunate to have
Jack accompany us on our last expedition in the Hawaiian Islands where he found
many new distribution records and several new species.  I'll never forget
Biscogniauxia .