Format: ORAL

Hyppolite L. Agnon1*, Yu-Guang Fan2, Martin Ryberg3, Nourou S. Yorou1

1Research Unit Tropical Mycology and Plants-Soil Fungi Interactions, Faculty of Agronomy, University of Parakou, Parakou, Benin 2Key Laboratory of Tropical Translational Medicine of Ministry of Education Tropical Environment and Health Laboratory, School of Pharmacy, Hainan Medical University, Haikou, China 3Systematic Biology program, Department of Organismal Biology, Uppsala University, Norbyvägen, Uppsala, Sweden * Corresponding author

Over the past decade, Africa has recorded the highest annual rate of forest loss with 3.9 million hectares destroyed. This forest destruction causes the extinction of many species and at this rate of destruction, many species can go extinct and perhaps without being known. Whereas, despite the scientific communitys efforts to estimate and catalog fungal diversity, worldwide only a small fraction (ca. 3%) of fungal diversity has been named and described. In recent years, with the progress of science, mycology has undergone a rapid development. Thus, since 2017, we have been interested to the diversity of Inocybaceae in Tropical Africa through the description and documentation of new species with an update on known species. The results show that in Africa, the diversity of Inocybaceae is about 80 species against 1,100 species in the world and the members of Inocybaceae are one of the most dominant in the soil of the woodlands and gallery forests after Russulaceae Lotsy. Nine new species are described and published in three genera like Inocybe (I. beninensis, I. flavipes, and I. fuscobrunnea and I. pallidiangulata), Inosperma (I. africanum, I. bulbomarginatum, I. flavobrunneum, and I. macrocarpa) and Mallocybe (Mallocybe africana). We are convinced that there are still enough unknown Inocybaceae species and we must redouble our efforts in sampling and also the exploration of new habitats in Africa.