Many mushrooms - or the 'fruits of fungi' - are extremely valuable, wild-gathered products which are utilised for both their medicinal properties and as food. In many of the world's tropical and temperate forests, they are the primary source of income for the people who live there.
These forests range from temperate woodlands and small forests to high altitude forests in the Himalaya and tropical miombo woodlands in south-central Africa. In south-west China, over 200 species of wild fungi in 64 genera are commercially traded while in Europe and North America, woodlands and small forests are the source of many highly-prized mushrooms and an essential resource for many small enterprises and collectors. Yet the increased demand for timber has resulted in the rapid expansion of forestry, which in turn has destroyed the natural habitat of many fungi, unbalancing both forest economics and ecology.

Despite the economic, social and cultural values of fungi, there is a general lack of understanding of their importance to local livelihoods and forest ecology. This book aims to fill this gap and extends the People and Plants Conservation Series beyond the plant kingdom into the related world of fungi and mushrooms. It demonstrates the crucial roles that fungi play in maintaining forest ecosystems and the livelihoods of rural people throughout the world while providing good practice guidelines for the sustainable management of this resource and an assessment of economic value. It brings together the perspectives of biologists, anthropologists and forest and woodland managers to provide a unique inter-disciplinary and international overview of the key issues.

Dr A B (Tony) Cunningham works with People and Plants International (PPI), is a Senior Associate at CIFOR and an Adjunct Professor at the School of Plant Biology, University of Western Australia. He is an ethnoecologist/applied ecologist who has focussed on the interface between local livelihoods, sustainable natural resource use and conservation. He has written many peer reviewed publications, including the book 'Applied ethnobotany: people, wild plant use and conservation' (Earthscan, 2001) and has been the recipient of several awards, including the Sir Peter Scott Conservation award (1999) from IUCN and the E K Janakki medal (2003) for services to the field of ethnobotany.

Dr Xuefei Yang did her first MSc on forests and land-use changes in Yunnan, China (2001) and then worked extensively on matsutake mushrooms, firstly for an MSc through the Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation at Enschede in The Netherlands (2004) and later for her PhD through the Kunming Institite of Botany, Chinese Academy of Science (2005). She is currently the Scientific coordinator for the Biodiversity-Ecosystem Functioning (BEF) Experiment in China (www.bef-china.de), jointly funded by German Research Foundation (DFG) and National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC). In 2007, she received the 'Alice Murphy' Award from the International Society for Tropical Ecology during the 2007 Tropical Ecology Congress in Dehra Dun, India.