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Top: Giuliana Furci wrote a field guide for Chilean fungi and set up the Fungi Foundation when she realized the unique organisms were largely ignored in Chile. Visual: Mateo Barrenengoa
I n 1999, Giuliana Furci developed a profound interest in fungi. They were everywhere, and the 20-year-old took particular joy in the multiformity of mushrooms: small and button-shaped; tall and umbrella-like; bulging, with crimson red caps topped with white flakes. But Furci also quickly realized that these fungi went largely ignored in Chile, where there were few guidebooks and an almost total lack of policies and resources to legally protect them from over-harvesting, land exploitation, and deforestation.
Determined to correct this, Furci wrote a field guide for Chilean fungi and set up the Fungi Foundation — a nonprofit dedicated to fungi conservation for which she is the executive director. In 2010, she took an even bigger step: Allied with other environmental nonprofits, Furci put forward a proposal for the Chilean government to systematically assess how large new developments such as housing, dams, and highways affect fungi. In 2012, the motion passed and Chile became the first country in the world to protect fungi by law.
Chile is unique in its legal commitment to these spore-producing organisms. As a taxonomic group, fungi are both ubiquitous and diverse, including molds, yeast, mushrooms, and a variety of other organisms. They are also largely neglected in global conservation efforts. Of the estimated 2.2 to 3.8 million species of fungi on Earth, approximately 450 have been assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature for inclusion on its Red List of Threatened Species, a large-scale effort to catalog the conservation status of species across the globe. Groups like mammals, birds, and amphibians have been completely or almost completely assessed, while fungi account for less than a percent of all assessments to date.
