Mushroom Biodiversity & Livelihoods

The Kingdom of Fungi is one of the largest kingdoms of life on the planet, with an estimated four to five million species. However, to date scientists have only described about 200,000 of them. Yet fungi are a vital part of the ecosystem and most people don’t realize that without fungi there would be no forests.

The Balipara Foundation is on a mission to document and conserve the wild fungi in one of the richest and most biodiverse places on the planet – the Eastern Himalayas, continually threatened with habitat destruction and now climate change. In 2018, The Balipara Foundation and the Kunming Institute of Botany jointly launched a study on the Mushroom diversity of the North-Eastern part of India. Through this study we seek to understand the biodiversity of fungal species in the Eastern Himalayas, as well as their potential as alternative, sustainable sources of income and household nutrition for rural and impoverished communities.