Five minutes with GWT's resident fungi expert

With fungi season just around the corner, we chatted to our resident fungi expert and GWT’s Citizen Science & Evidence Officer, Ellen Winter, about her journey into wildlife and ecology.

I’ve always loved nature and had the enormous privilege of growing up with a 500-acre nature reserve just over our back fence, so our garden was full of wonderful wildlife like purple emperor butterflies and greater stag beetles.

Fungi was all around, even on my walk to primary school. There was a tiny patch of National Trust land on my way there, only around 15m²with four big oak trees taking up the majority of the space, but the amount of fungi there had me hooked. From boletes to funnel caps, I was fascinated by the different shapes, colours and the places they turned up.

Porcelain fungi, Oudemansiella mucida — Porcelain fungus, *Oudemansiella mucida* (c) Ellen Winter

As my interest grew, I went to study zoology with mycology at the University of Sheffield. My journey to my current role has been an interesting one; I’ve been a zookeeper, worked in communities (including a company that redirected excess corporate furniture all around the world, doing some wonderful projects like outfitting the Limbe Wildlife Education Centre in Cameroon, shipping a sixth form college to Sierra Leone and a school to Romania to mention just a few!), and travelled to and from Japan overland before joining GWT in a community-based role. After about a decade I then moved into the Evidence team.

My current role is a huge opportunity, but it’s also a massive responsibility. Part of my job is measuring the impact caused by humans and climate change, and what that looks like across the nature reserves of Gloucestershire. I monitor how species are moving, what effect our management is having, and how that affects the overall ecology of a reserve.

I’m seeing woodlands in particular really struggling, likely because of the impact of grey squirrels and the number of deer in the UK. Woods are trying to regenerate but saplings get eaten before they’re big enough to survive. The data that I and my wonderful volunteers have collected shows too little recruitment of young trees, for the natural regeneration that woodlands need to thrive into the future.

Oak sapling in the light — Oak sapling (c) Scott Petrek

Tree planting can help, but it needs to be the right plant in the right place, and natural regeneration is the best way of all.

The more people that are aware, learning and becoming advocates for the environment, the better off nature will be. Volunteering is a great way to deepen your connection to the natural world, and after a day out surveying the wild places of this county you do sleep well!

I often see fungi while surveying, and there are some really fantastic ones out there. The colours of lurid bolete or cobalt crust can be spectacular, but I love the fungi that have weird smells. There’s sulphur knight, a sulphur-yellow colour that smells of coal gas, and there’s the crab-scented and coconut-scented russulas. Coconut russula actually smells more like coconut than a real coconut!

It's so important that we look after nature and all make changes to fight climate breakdown. If we support wild places in the right way, they - and we - may thrive for many generations to come.