March Speaker

Ice and Fire: Spring-fruiting Fungi in the Mountains

Thea Chesney is a lifelong Sierra Nevada foothill resident and naturalist. She has had an interest in mushrooms (and plants, and the rest of the natural world) since early childhood, which gradually became an obsession.
She holds a B.S. in forestry from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis in botany and natural sciences. During her time at Berkeley, she spent plenty of time working and hanging out in the Berkeley mycology labs. She worked on a mushroom survey crew for the U.S. Forest Service around Mt. Shasta for several seasons, which allowed her to become intimately familiar with the fungal inhabitants and ecology of the area. Since then, she has continued with the Forest Service as a botanist for a long-term California-wide meadow monitoring project. She teaches occasional workshops in mushroom and plant identification, both for work and independently. Her fieldwork and her own studies of plants and fungi are centered in the Sierra Nevada and other mountains of California, and she is currently working on a field guide to mushrooms of these understudied regions.


March Speaker Ice and Fire: Spring-fruiting Fungi in the Mountains Thea Chesney is a lifelong Sierra Nevada foothill resident and naturalist. She has had an interest in mushrooms (and plants, and the rest of the natural world) since early childhood, which gradually became an obsession. She holds a B.S. in forestry from UC Berkeley, with an emphasis in botany and natural sciences. During her time at Berkeley, she spent plenty of time working and hanging out in the Berkeley mycology labs. She worked on a mushroom survey crew for the U.S. Forest Service around Mt. Shasta for several seasons, which allowed her to become intimately familiar with the fungal inhabitants and ecology of the area. Since then, she has continued with the Forest Service as a botanist for a long-term California-wide meadow monitoring project. She teaches occasional workshops in mushroom and plant identification, both for work and independently. Her fieldwork and her own studies of plants and fungi are centered in the Sierra Nevada and other mountains of California, and she is currently working on a field guide to mushrooms of these understudied regions.
Mycena News - March 2022