21st Century Guidebook to Fungi

The following classification is adapted from the 9th and 10th editions of The Dictionary of the Fungi (Kirk et al., 2001, 2008), but it has been amended to adopt the phylogenetic arrangement emerging from the AFTOL (Assembling the Fungal Tree of Life) project funded by the US National Science Foundation (visit: http://www.aftol.org/; and see Blackwell et al., 2006), as set out by Hibbett et al. (2007).

The AFTOL project is a work in progress and uncertainties remain about the exact relationships of many groups. These are indicated in the annotated classification below with the abbreviation ‘inc. sed.’, which stands for incertae sedis, meaning ‘of uncertain position’, this being the standard term for a taxonomic group of currently unknown or undefined relationship. Some of the material contained in this section is sourced from the ‘Classification of the fungi’ entry (written by David Moore) in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and is used with permission, by courtesy of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.© 2008.