High throughput sequencing has opened the door to exciting new approaches to detect and classify unknown fungal diversity, particularly of ecologically cryptic fungi. Both the methodological approaches to accurately delimit and recognize fungal taxa from these data and the nomenclatural hurdles to describe them formally have posed challenges to advance the classification of these "dark fungi", lineages only known from sequence data for which no physical voucher material or cultures are available.
This topical collection, compiled by Robert Lücking and David Hawksworth, flags papers that in some way relate to dark fungi taxonomy and nomenclature, including methodological approaches, nomenclature, and associated topics such as important resources, the extent of unknown fungal diversity, or aspects of species concepts in lineages only known from sequence data.
Other relevant articles include:
Lücking, R., Moncada, B. Dismantling Marchandiomphalina into Agonimia (Verrucariaceae) and Lawreymyces gen. nov. (Corticiaceae): setting a precedent to the formal recognition of thousands of voucherless fungi based on type sequences. Fungal Diversity 84, 119–138 (2017).
Image: Figure 1 from Khan et al., used under CC BY 4.0. Image resized.
