A growing network of Black mushroom enthusiasts, cultivators and researchers across the United States is contributing to the expanding field of mycology while exploring the cultural and historical connections between fungi and the African diaspora.Their work comes as interest in fungi has accelerated globally, driven by ecological research, culinary trends and the rise of citizen science.

Amateur researchers and independent cultivators have increasingly played a central role in identifying fungal species and documenting ecosystems, partly because professional mycology remains a relatively small scientific field.

Maria Pinto, a Jamaican American naturalist and writer based in Newton, Massachusetts, traces her fascination with fungi to an encounter in 2013 with an American yellow fly agaric mushroom while walking through nearby woods. The poisonous fungus, notable for its vivid yellow coloring and metallic sheen, immediately captured her attention.

“It forced me down on my knees to examine it further, because it didn’t look real,” Pinto said. “It looked like it was from another dimension.”

That experience eventually led Pinto deeper into mycology, the study of fungi, and toward researching the relationship between Black communities and fungal traditions throughout the Americas. In her recent book, Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival, Pinto documents Black mushroom growers, foragers and researchers working across North and South America and the Caribbean. Fearless, Sleepless, Deathless: What Fungi Taught Me about Nourishment, Poison, Ecology, Hidden Histories, Zombies, and Black Survival

Scientists estimate that Earth may contain roughly three million fungal species, though only a small percentage have been formally identified.

Fungi, which include mushrooms, molds and yeasts, were not formally recognized as a distinct biological kingdom until 1969, making the field comparatively young relative to other biological sciences.

Pinto said Black participants in mycology often remain geographically isolated despite growing interest in the field.“We exist, but in isolation around the country,” she said. “I think there are definitely efforts to mitigate that, or to actually get us together, but not a really concerted one.”

In Oregon, Elan Hagens has spent decades working with fungi through foraging, cultivation and education. Her interest began during childhood while attending environmental and nature-based programs in the Portland area.

Later, after appearing on the 2008 CBS reality television series Greatest American Dog, she learned that dogs could be trained to locate truffles, underground fungi valued in high-end cuisine.At the time, Oregon’s commercial truffle industry was still emerging. In 2011, Hagens founded temptresstruffles.com⁠, a company focused on truffle foraging and mushroom education. She later shifted from dog training toward workshops on mushroom cultivation and fungal identification.

One of her most memorable discoveries came in 2020 while walking beside a river in the Portland metropolitan area. She spotted a massive oyster mushroom growing high on a tree trunk.

“People were walking and jogging in front of me, and nobody is seeing this mushroom,” Hagens said. “It’s like the biggest thing I’ve ever seen in my life.”After returning later with equipment to harvest it safely, she prepared the edible portions as potstickers.

Hagens has also organized guided mushroom walks aimed at introducing Black, Indigenous and other underrepresented communities to fungal ecology.

During one event in Oregon, participants encountered sulphur tuft mushrooms, known for faint bioluminescent properties and their ability to glow under ultraviolet light.

“That’s something that people love to see, because it’s more than just: ‘Oh, that’s a poisonous mushroom,’ or: ‘That’s an edible mushroom,’” Hagens said. “It’s something that makes them think outside the box.”

Hagens frequently collaborates with William Padilla-Brown, a Pennsylvania-based ecological researcher and fungi cultivator who has become a prominent figure in independent mycology education in the United States.

Padilla-Brown founded mycofest.net⁠ in 2015 as an annual festival focused on ecology, fungi research and public education. Held in central Pennsylvania, the event combines scientific presentations, guided foraging walks, workshops and fungal identification services using DNA testing technology.

“I don’t even know that many Black mycologists,” Padilla-Brown said. “I’m just waiting for more folks to show up for real.”The 2026 edition of MycoFest is scheduled to take place from July 31 to August 2 at Four Quarters Interfaith Sanctuary.

The same year he launched the festival, Padilla-Brown established mycosymbiotics.com⁠, a business focused on cultivating fungi such as cordyceps and producing mushroom extracts.

Largely self-taught through books and mentorships, Padilla-Brown said his interest in fungi began during adolescence after experimenting with psychedelic mushrooms.At 17, he was arrested on cannabis-related charges. After becoming a parent several years later, he redirected his interests into legal mushroom cultivation and educational work.

His business now includes mushroom farming, workshops and fungal product development. He recently completed a documentary on truffle culture and helped establish the mycosymbiotics.com⁠, an agricultural cooperative supporting fungi producers.

Padilla-Brown also received a two-year grant worth $26,000 from the United States Department of Agriculture to study the potential for cultivating native truffles in the northeastern United States.

Much of his recent work has focused on preserving fungal biodiversity through cultivation and storage techniques.

“I’ll be freezing them all in the final preservation here to preserve sensitive organisms into the future,” Padilla-Brown said. “I just want to hold on to them. It’s like a modern Noah’s ark kind of vibe.”

For Pinto, fungi also provide a framework for understanding cultural continuity and survival across the African diaspora. In her writing, she traces linguistic and culinary links connecting Black communities and mushrooms, including the Jamaican patois term “junjo” for fungus and “djon djon,” the name for prized edible black mushrooms used in Haitian cuisine.

She also references the Butiko clan in Uganda, whose symbolism and oral traditions incorporate mushrooms.These discoveries, Pinto said, challenged assumptions that mushrooms held little significance within Black cultural histories.

“The more I learn about the ancient origins and tantalizing futurity of fungi, about their centrality to healthy ecosystems and their adaptability, about their potential for earthly and mental remediation, the more I’ve realized that my kinship lines feel more mycelial than tree-like,” she wrote in the introduction to her book.

“Like fungi, the stuff I’m made of has the power to move in darkness, to thrive undetected, to quietly work until such a time as there’s nothing left to do but fruit.”

A network of U.S. scientists is intensifying efforts to develop more climate-resilient apple trees as increasingly volatile weather patterns threaten orchards across major fruit-growing regions, raising concerns about long-term risks to an industry that generates roughly $23 billion in annual economic activity.

Researchers at Cornell University, the United States Department of Agriculture and several partner institutions are focusing on rootstocks, the underground foundation of commercial apple trees that influences growth, productivity and resistance to environmental stress.

The work has gained urgency since a series of severe temperature swings damaged orchards in the northeastern United States in 2015, an event that some researchers later linked to a phenomenon known as “rapid apple decline.”

Terence Robinson, a horticulture professor at Cornell University, recalled how unusually warm temperatures in February 2015 were followed by a sharp cold snap that swept through New York and into fruit-growing regions of Pennsylvania.“We got a warm-up in February, and then a big cold air mass moved into New York and pushed all the way down into the fruit-growing area of Pennsylvania,” Robinson said.

“In the spring, we started seeing tree damage.”Scientists concluded that the rapid temperature drop, estimated at as much as 65 degrees Fahrenheit within days, disrupted trees that had already begun emerging from winter dormancy. Researchers found particularly severe damage in rootstocks rather than trunks or branches.

The findings drew attention to vulnerabilities in some of the apple industry’s most widely used rootstocks, including the M9 variety developed more than a century ago at England’s East Malling Research Station.Commercial apple trees are typically produced through grafting, a process that combines two different plants.

The upper fruit-bearing portion, known as the scion, comes from commercial varieties such as Gala or Red Delicious. That section is attached to a separate rootstock selected for characteristics including tree size, productivity and disease resistance.

Because rootstocks determine how trees absorb water, respond to stress and tolerate environmental conditions, scientists increasingly view them as central to protecting orchards from climate-related disruptions.Robinson and USDA scientist Gennaro Fazio jointly oversee the Geneva Apple Rootstock Breeding Program, based in Geneva, New York.

The initiative, operated by Cornell University and the USDA, is the only commercial apple rootstock breeding effort in North America focused on developing new foundations for orchards.Since 1968, researchers in the program have crossed and evaluated thousands of apple rootstocks.

Early efforts concentrated largely on disease resistance, particularly protection against fire blight, a destructive bacterial disease affecting apple and pear trees.More recently, researchers have expanded their priorities to include drought tolerance, resistance to high-salinity soils and improved survival during unstable winter conditions.

“We still continue wanting to have a rootstock that is dwarfing, because dwarf orchards are much more profitable, and that produces early,” Robinson said. “We have broadened our list of goals for this program to include drought resistance, tolerance of high-salt-content soils and the ability to withstand more moderate winters.”The process is lengthy.

Developing a commercial rootstock can take decades because scientists must cross parent trees, evaluate offspring for desirable characteristics and test performance across multiple climates and growing conditions.Cornell released its first commercial rootstock in 1997, nearly three decades after the program began.

Some varieties introduced in 2023 originated from genetic crosses first made during the 1970s.“It requires long-term commitment to learn to love apple rootstocks,” Robinson said.Researchers say the challenge has become more complicated because climate variability is increasing faster than orchard replacement cycles.

Apple orchards are typically expected to remain productive for 15 to 30 years, meaning growers must make planting decisions without knowing exactly how weather patterns may evolve over the lifespan of their trees.

Lee Kalcsits, a professor of tree fruit physiology at Washington State University, leads the Strengthening Pear and Apple Resistance to Climate project, known as Sparc, a national research collaboration studying how extreme weather affects fruit trees.

Kalcsits said breeding efforts should prioritize adaptability rather than designing trees for one specific future climate scenario.“We need to be mindful that the rootstocks we select are adaptable,” he said. “It’s not that they’re adapted to a future climate, but that they’re adaptable.”Research published by Kalcsits and colleagues in 2024 found that both fall and spring temperatures are warming in major U.S. apple-growing regions.

Warmer conditions can interfere with the chilling requirements apple trees need before flowering and can also cause trees to leave dormancy earlier, increasing exposure to damaging cold events.Scientists say abrupt winter fluctuations have become a growing concern as climate-driven disruptions to atmospheric circulation allow Arctic air masses to move farther south into the United States.

Robinson said damaging cold snaps have struck major apple-producing areas, including southern Pennsylvania and western Michigan, four times since 2015.Rootstocks can influence how trees respond to those conditions by affecting dormancy timing, cold tolerance and water use.

Some newer rootstocks developed through the Geneva program have shown reduced damage during false springs followed by hard freezes compared with older standards such as M9.Researchers are also turning to wild apple populations from central Asia, where domesticated apples originated, to expand genetic diversity and identify additional stress-resistance traits.

Experimental rootstocks are tested nationwide through a research collaboration known as NC-140, which evaluates orchard performance across multiple states. One test site operates at North Carolina State University’s Mountain Horticultural Crops Research Station near Asheville.

Mike Parker, a tree fruit extension specialist at North Carolina State University, said scientists monitor survival rates, trunk growth, fruit size and yields over many years before recommending new rootstocks to commercial growers.“When we put the replicated trials in multiple states, there’s things that we find out real quick, like that this rootstock is a dog and ain’t going to fly,” Parker said.

“We would much rather kill trees at our research station than have growers lose trees on their farm.”Parker has overseen the university’s rootstock evaluations since 1996 and, like Robinson, is approaching retirement.

Robinson said he is concerned that long-term agricultural breeding programs may struggle to attract younger researchers, many of whom prefer working on commercially visible fruit varieties rather than root systems that can take decades to develop.

He also expressed concern that funding agencies could eventually scale back support for long-duration breeding programs if policymakers conclude that existing rootstocks are sufficient for current industry needs.“I fear that they’ll say: ‘We have enough rootstocks, let’s just close down this effort,’” Robinson said.

“And for things that we’re facing right now, we probably have a good series of rootstocks available. But it’s these emerging problems, that you don’t really think of or didn’t plan for, that you might not be able to respond to if they shut down the program.”