Currently interested in studying the Leucocoprinus genus since these mushrooms are very versatile in their habitats and seem to be becoming more common due to climate change and human activity. There's some potential applications for them I want to explore so I'm looking to get samples for growing and testing.

In order to better learn about the genus I recently created the Wikipedia pages for about half the described species and added to the existing ones so I've spent a lot of time just reading the taxonomy and descriptions on them and tracking down the original source material. Wikipedia makes for a great place to collate this in references so it's more easily found for others in the future. It's apparent that some of the accepted species are duplicates that should be synonyms or were reclassified but forgotten about. Many have only a single recorded specimen and description so are dubious and some were only described in rare books that have not been digitised so there is still no information out there for them. I'll try to find physical copies of the books and create the rest of the pages soon to sort out some of the more obscure ones.

However amongst all that there are some interesting obscure species which do show up from time to time but simply aren't well known. Also some which are probably actually quite common but routinely get misidentified as L. birnbaumii. So I hope to be able to shed some light on these and make the information more accessible to others.

Due to their often spectacular appearance and their tendency to show up uninvited in plant pots and garden beds, it seems that Leucocoprinus species are often one of the first mushrooms people ever take an interest in or learn to identify. They don't give you much choice but to notice them when a big scary looking yellow mushroom turns up in your potted plant. I'm constantly seeing ID requests from people who want to know if it is bad for the plant or dangerous to them. As a result I think Leucocoprinus is an important genus to get information out there about so that it may help encourage more people to learn about mushrooms after finding them in their plant pots. The result of that may be dispelling misinformation and encouraging an interest in nature amongst more people. If Leucocoprinus birnbaumii had not appeared in my Aloe vera all those years ago I don't know that I ever would have started learning about Mycology...