The ABFG database (CATE) has already assembled 30,000 fungal records: AGM Report by Michael Jordan

This year the Association anticipated adding an initial 10,000 fungus records to the new database. Within two months, however, the dataset has acquired three times that total. The rationale for investment in the new database is summed up in a neat little acronym, CATE:  

1. Composition. Not that of the database but of organisations. Alignments have changed radically in recent years. Based on reported membership numbers at the end of 2007, three quarters to four fifths of all UK mycological field interest now considers the ABFG to be its representative organisation and it is partly in light of this but most importantly the need to take standards of data management and data application forward that the investment was made.

2. Application . Surely the importance of a database in conservation terms is how the data, once delivered, is managed. It is not in anyone's interests for matters to be left hanging, year on year, on vital projects like Biodiversity Action Plans, Red Data list - because inevitably there will be consequences for UK fungus conservation. And the development of the database, so long as it is sufficiently supported, will give the ABFG the leverage to make sure that some of the worst mishaps that we've seen are less likely to happen again. There has been a type of closet culture with these projects and what's happened in both is a demonstration of what can go wrong when the ‘shutters go up'.

3. Technical quality. This database has been developed with a first rate modern control system. It is streets ahead in what registered users can do simply by going on line. It gives recorders the easy ability to upload and manage their own data and for analysis there are now over 20 interrelated search functions. The investment means that for the first time real opportunities for data analysis have been made available to the field community as a whole. The recording package that will be distributed by the end of April is also a state-of-the-art tailor-made facility to make recording very easy and very accurate.

4. Endorsement. Having looked at the elements that I've mentioned, the National Biodiversity Network Trust and Joint Nature Conservation Committee data teams have given their cooperation to this project. As Trevor James at NBN has said ‘the mycological world is now not alone in having different routes through which data may come'. With modern IT facilities, one monolithic database like the FRDBI has no advantage over more than one, in fact there are clear disadvantages.

Subjective arguments are going to arise telling you we need to restrict accession to one database in one organisation, because this breaks a very long-standing monopoly on data control. But the database has earned the approval of several major authorities and, as indicateed above, it has already received 30,000 new records, but that is still small beer and the benefits are always going to be proportional to the number of records. When it reaches100,000 records the search facility will start to come truly into its own, but we have to get there.

Why support it? 1. Because it's your database, under your control, in your organisation. 2. I hope that this database stands for a radical change of philosophy. If people are interested enough to volunteer time and energy to deliver records to a collective pool, they should also share the benefits of the resource that is created, because what the pool is actually there for is to further our means of understanding, and managing, and conserving. Simply displaying strings of records on a web page makes the resource available only in the most nominal sense. I want to look back when I hang up my wellies and feel that at least some of the collected mycological data in the UK is managed by and freely available to the people that delivered it and the people that are ultimately expected to act on it.

Benefits: If this dataset receives the necessary support, anybody who is interested can contribute from their homes, to sections of a Red List of a BAP list using IUCN criteria (over which we can help). They can be part of our pool of knowledge, rather than sitting on the sidelines at the behest of a diminishing and exclusive ‘club' that then too easily finds itself out of its depth.

Imitation. There may now be moves to copy elements. But imitation runs a poor second to innovation and without the initiative there is no indication that things would have moved forward in UK data management. We have delivered the best in what a UK fungus database should offer and what a recording package will shortly offer. If I have a regret it is that we couldn't deliver earlier but the finances had to be raised. My hope is that this will be judged, not subjective territorial agenda, but on technical and practical merit, and a philosophy that the resource is there to be shared constructively by the whole mycological community.

Monopolies are not a panacea. If everyone shops at Tescos because it is what they are used to then Tesco determines the quality of what appears on the shelves.

The hard question, but it's one that deserves to be asked, is what constructive benefit has the data delivered to the system by field groups in the last 10 years been put to? If there are satisfactory answers, fine, no need to look for other options. But there is little detectable evidence in the Important Fungus Areas project, nor the Biodiversity Action Plan list, certainly not in the Red Data list (which JNCC rejected partly for that reason when a ‘draft' was delivered in 2005). It is little short of a mycological disgrace that the UK has no authoritative or credible list of threatened and vulnerable fungi. And the individual – you and I – can't start to analyse the data in its assembled form because that facility was never incorporated into the design of the FRDBI. And if there is no convincing answer then what is the point of delivering data to the existing system?

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