Anton Savchenko
@notgaudi
fungal taxonomist • PhD • Ukrainian expat • melancholic for all the good reasons • he/him
How nice would it feel to pick these 0.5 mm discomycetes with golden pincers...
I need these for uhh professional reasons. Yes, required for specimen sampling, yes yes
There is Backrooms, there is Obsession, and there is Epps That Crack Under High RPM
RGB values were then automatically translated into color names, which fell rather nicely into color categories assigned subjectively by eye. Unsurprisingly, most of the failed extracts were dark-colored (and also old!), though ~half of dark extracts performed just fine in PCR and sequencing.
Machine vision for poor people, or yet another way to misuse Quantum GIS! I wanted to know if color of DNA extract correlates with sequencing success, and to get the colors I imported a photo of extracts into QGIS as if it was a map, placed sample points, and measured their underlying RGB values.
Sampling was... not boring: most of the material is corticioids (sometimes as thin as <100um) the most difficult fungi to sample imo.
The library is on site and very rich, with titles dating back to Linnaeus
One of a few places with a dedicated collection of spore prints (hundreds if not thousands of them!).
Spent the last 2 weeks sampling dozens of type specimens in a well maintained, almost fully digitized, and just lovely TAAM fungarium (Tartu).
And then some of the most productive collectors (pre-1930 picked separately because of the different order of magnitude). Funny to see how RA Maas Geesteranus dwarfed everyone with his PhD effort (defended 1947). Also interesting to note long careers of C Bas and HC van Hall tl2.io/Authors/Hall...
When did herbarium in Leiden become this big? Trends in collection of regular specimens vs. types; fungi and lichens; notable collectors and expeditions. (Mind that only ca. 20% of fungarium is digitized.)