Adirondacks, New York (August 2012)
The second field trip for the PolyPEET project was held in the beautiful Adirondack Mountains in New York.
We were able to collect at the Huntington Wildlife Forest, which is connected to the Adirondack Ecological Center of SUNY-College of Environmental Science and Forestry. We had a full crew for this expedition, including all of the PolyPEET people and almost all of the Hibbett Lab.
The field trip also included a foray and workshop for the public.
Virgin Islands National Park (February 2012)
The first field trip for the PolyPEET project was held in the Virgin Islands National Park (St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands) from Feb 4th to Feb 13th 2012. Elisabet Sjökvist, Beatriz Ortiz-Santana, Dimitris Floudas and Alfredo Justo participated in the field work and related activities.
An outreach seminar about biodiversity and systematics of fungi was held at the Virgin Islands Environmental Resource Station (VIERS).
Over 300 collections of mushroom-forming fungi, the great majority polypore and corticioid fungi, were collected during this field trip and are currently under study. These collections will increase our knowledge of tropical Polyporales and also contribute to the catalog of macrofungi of the Park.
You can see some photos of the field work, the mushrooms we collected and the outreach seminar here:
Summer 2010
RET (Research Experiences for Teachers) and RAHSS (Research Experiences for High School Students) supplements to our NSF PolyPEET grant allowed us to host Loreen Meyer, who is a teacher from King Philip Regional High School, and Claudia Osorio and David Marcano, who are high school students from the University Park Campus School for a summer research experience.
Front, L->R: Claudia, Loreen, Darcy. Back, L->R: Jaya, Brian, Dimitris, Alfredo, David H., Mitchell, Manfred, Anders, Xiao-Yong, David M.
Loreen, Claudia and David worked with Alfredo during the summer of 2010 on molecular systematics of polypores, obtaining ITS data for several collections of Trametes and other Polyporales.
Loreen discussed the connection between her summer research 
and academic year teaching in an article in the Sun Chronicle.