PNW Master Mushroom List
Wild Mushrooms of the Pacific Northwest
This document is a compendium of Pacific Northwest and Northern California mushrooms arranged alphabetically by scientific genus/species name. Each entry includes the family name, group name, and if available, the common name(s) and other name(s) that the mushroom was previously known by or synonyms. The ‘other names’ can be helpful when looking up mushrooms in older mushroom books.
In some cases it was impossible to list all of the synonyms. If you want to look them up refer to Index Fungorum’s search page (www.indexfungorum.org). Once you type in the mushroom’s name you can click on it to find the synonyms. Some do not have any and some have a lot of previous names. Index Fungorum is an international project to index all formal names in the fungus kingdom.
So many of the North American mushroom names were copied from the European species. They were also dependent on mostly macroscopic characteristics. What has happened in the last few years is that DNA has come into the picture. With DNA it was discovered that just because a mushroom looked like another mushroom did not mean that it was related. It may not even be in the same family. Many of the name changes reflect this new information.
If you have purchased any new mushroom books in the last few years you will notice these updated name changes. It is hard to keep up. That is why I have tried to produce as current a list as possible. I expect that many more name changes will occur as more mushrooms are investigated, but for now you can look up a mushroom by genus/species to find the most current name.
A name change may only affect the genus, or it might have changed the genus and species. It will be listed in red next to their previous name. Go to the new name in the list to find a complete entry under that new name. Note if there has been a genus change or a complete name change then the family has most likely changed as well.
Note: Because of space requirements some of the entries in this list appear in a small font. You can use the zoom control in your web browser to make them easier to read.
Updated: September, 2020