Aliyah Jara, Timothy Wtorkowski, Puspita Dasroy
As a fungi species commonly found east of the Rockies, the Ganoderma sessile can be, and certainly has been, spotted in New York. Lots of mushroom blogs exist, on which people share their findings and classifications of mushrooms throughout the city. Such blogs describe sightings in Whitehall and White Plains NY. According to a Tree Care Magazine, mycologists have identified Ganoderma Sessile in NY all the way back in 1902. A book about the Missouri Botanical Garden also mentions sightings of the fungi in the early 1900s.
Today, we have our iNaturalist movement, which allows us to record sightings of Ganoderma sessile collectively on a much larger scale. We intend to use this data to draw conclusions about the frequency of Ganoderma spotted in NY throughout a single year. Will more Ganoderma be spotted during the cold months or the warmer months of the year? This is what we intend to discover using both iNaturalist data and weather data from the same time period.
