2018 Telluride Mushroom Festival

Learn about the theory and practice of using fungi to improve the quality of degraded environments in this mycoremediation workshop. The knowledge learned here can be applied to restoring degraded soil, breaking down chemical contaminants, filtering water pollutants, and more.

The workshop will cover the ecological mechansisms of fungi that make them such great remediators, including mycelial sorption of ions, chemical break down by fungal enzymes and mycorrhizal symbiosis. Various kinds of environmental problems and contaminants will be discussed and the role fungi can play in alleviating them.

In addition to learning the theory behind mycoremediation, there will be several demos and hands of sections showing how to train fungi to degrade contaminants, harvest enzymes for use in biodegradation, build mycelium based water filtration systems, and more.

The workshop will conclude with several case studies to highlight lessons and challenges in trying to perform this work, followed by a talk on big picture integration of mycoremediation into human cultural systems, including ways to practically incorporate it into homesteads, farms and city infrastructure.

Participants will leave the workshop with an understanding of the current state of knowledge of mycoremediation, tools to begin implementing their own mycoremediation experiments, guidance about promising future directions in the field, and much more!