1. Introduction

Stołowe Mountains National Park was created on September 16, 1993, to protect entire ecosystems, provide areas for recreation, and for educational and scientific purposes. The national park was formed based on the previously existing Stołowogórski Landscape Park, created in 1981. It is located in southern Poland, north-west of the Kłodzko region, near the Polish-Czech border in the Central Sudetic Mountains (Kondracki, 1994). It covers ca 63 km2, including two highest peaks – Szczeliniec Wielki (919 m asl) and Skalniak (915 m asl) and ca 105 km2 of buffer zone, where famous health resorts such as Duszniki Zdrój, Polanica Zdrój or Kudowa Zdrój are located. The development of these resorts since the mid-19th century has significantly influenced the entire Stołowe Mountains region (https://­pngs.gov.pl/).

The geographic location of the region on the border of the Czech Republic and Poland has resulted in a complex history for this area. Human activity in the Stołowe Mountains dates back to the Paleolithic era, and it was crossed by the Amber Route in ancient times. One of the first known tourist events occurred in the 16th century when a Jesuit climbed Szczeliniec Wielki (Marek, 2020). Later, the rapid development of industry and health resorts in the 19th century, when the region was part of Prussia, began to affect the natural character of the area. Although, after the Second World War when Kłodzko Land became part of Poland, along with mass resettlements of the population, the industry collapsed, it was soon replaced by massive touristic movements, still posing the main threat to the nature of Stołowe Mountains National Park, as the park is visited by over a million people annually (https://pngs.gov.pl/).

Stołowe Mountains National Park is best known for its unique geological formations. Its landscape is mostly shaped by a plate geological structure related to the sedimentary origin of the rocks (Staffa, 1992). The Stołowe Mountains form an isolated block, tectonically raised above the surrounding area of mostly Upper Cretaceous sediments (Pulinowa, 1989). The rock formations of the area are composed of two alternating sandstone layers with intercalations of marl-claystones (Kowalski, 1983). Although the soil layer of Stołowe Mountains is usually shallow, it has a mosaic character, contributing to the diversity of ecosystems observed there. The most characteristic soils of the park are sandy, acidic, and nutrient-poor spodosols derived from sandstone. However, large areas are also covered by cambisols of different fertility derived from marls and granites, and fluvisols can be found along streams and peatbogs (Kabała et al., 2003).

The biota of Stołowe Mountains National Park has been intensively studied since the 19th century. The vegetation of the park is shaped not only by diverse habitat conditions but is also transformed by many years of human activity. While currently, almost 90% of the area is covered by forest habitats, composed mostly of planted spruce (Picea abies) forest, the natural forest in this area was mainly composed of fir (Abies alba) and beech (Fagus sylvatica), which can still be observed in some parts of the park. On Wielkie Torfowisko Batorowskie, vegetation typical of peat bogs has developed. An important component of the flora of the Stołowe Mountains is pioneer rock vegetation, with numerous species of mosses, lichens, and liverworts. Diverse grassland communities cover an area of approximately 300 ha of the national park (Pender & Gołąb, 2003). To date, 1006 taxa (including 938 species) of vascular plants have been reported from the Stołowe Mountains area (Świerkosz et al., 2008).

Despite a long history of biota research in the Stołowe Mountains, knowledge of its mycobiota remains fragmentary, making this national park one of the least explored mycologically in Poland (Kujawa, 2017). Until 2013, only 56 species of fungi were reported from the area of the national park (Chachulski, 2013). A one-week-long, fifth field session of the Polish Mycological Society in 2016 resulted in the observation of almost 300 fungal species (Kujawa, 2017). Research performed in late summer and autumn of 2017 in an area of only 91.2 ha near the Czerwona Woda stream by the Institute of Dendrology PAS confirmed the occurrence of 240 fungal taxa (Jagodziński et al., 2017). The authors reported 22 species red-listed in Poland (as defined in Wojewoda & Ławrynowicz, 2006) and 2 protected ones (as defined by Rozporządzenie Ministra Środowiska z dnia 9 października 2014 r. w sprawie ochrony gatunkowej grzybów, Dz.U. 2014 poz. 1408), namely: Ganoderma lucidum (Curtis) P.Karst. and Microglossum viride (Schrad. ex J.F.Gmel.) Gillet. In a subsequent inventory near Kudowski Potok, the same authors reported 217 fungal taxa, including one protected (Ganoderma lucidum (Curtis) P.Karst.) and 48 red-listed species (Jagodziński et al., 2021). Among these, 5 species were classified as critically endangered (category E on “Redlist of the macrofungi in Poland” by Wojewoda & Ławrynowicz, 2006), namely: Byssocorticium atrovirens (Fr.) Bondartsev & Singer, Cantharellus friesii Quél., Ceriporia purpurea (Fr.) Donk, Crystallicutis serpens (Tode) El-Gharabawy, Leal-Dutra & G.W.Griff., and Mycoacia fuscoatra (Fr.) Donk. Pietras et al. (2025) performed an inventory in 2021, between the beginning of September and the first half of November. They reported 190 fungal taxa, including Cortinarius pellstonianus Ammirati & A.H. Sm, species not previously reported from Poland.

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (https://www.gbif.org/) is currently the most widely used database for integrating data on organism distributions. Currently, 164 Basidiomycota occurrences from Stołowe Mountains are recorded in GBIF (https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.yczef6; accessed 2024, August 20). Four of them are from the “Protected Fungi of Poland” dataset shared by the Polish Mycological Society.

A list of the species names from the aforementioned sources is provided in Supplementary Table S1. In total, 316 fungal species have been reported from the Stołowe Mountains National Park.

Recently, rapid biodiversity inventories, often called bio­blitzes, involving experts, have gained popularity as a method for generating biodiversity datasets for understudied areas (Parker et al., 2018; Gorczak et al., 2021). Although the number of species recorded during bioblitzes is highly dependent on environmental conditions and the specialists involved, short field trips and fieldwork organized by mycological societies, national parks, museums, and amateur naturalist groups are rich sources of information on fungal diversity (Kujawa et al., 2015, 2018). Mycological field courses organized by universities can also be considered a form of bioblitz, as they present similar opportunities, bringing together a large number of participants (i.e., students) and expert mycologists (i.e., mycology teachers).

Herein, we report the fungal diversity of the Stołowe Mountains National Park as a result of a mycological summer school, “From fungal morphology to genotype, ” organized jointly by the University of Warsaw (Warsaw, Poland), Charles University (Prague, Czech Republic), and Copenhagen University (Copenhagen, Denmark), from August 28 to September 3, 2023. The goal was to collect and identify fungi using phenotype, along with sequence data that has been made available in the GenBank (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/) and GBIF databases. We also compared our results with previously published fungal inventories for this region.

2. Materials and methods

Fungi were recorded in Stołowe Mountains National Park (Lower Silesia Voivodeship, Poland) between August 28 and September 3, 2023, by participants of the summer school “From fungal morphology to genotype” (42 students and eight teachers). The sampled sites represented 4 main areas of Stołowe Mountains National Park (Figure 1), mostly representing meadows near Pasterka, beech and spruce forests near Karłów, Rogowa Kopa, and Skalne Grzyby, as well as peat bogs near Wielkie Torfowisko Batorowskie. All collection events were recorded using the PlutoF Biodiversity Platform (https://plutof.ut.ee/) and the Plutof GO mobile app (https://plutof.ut.ee/go). All observations were recorded using the Danish Fungal Atlas (https://svampe.databasen.org/en/). The participants were asked to provide as much metadata as possible, including the plant species occurring at the collection site. The plants were identified based on morphology by the participants. Records were manually checked for redundant observations and filtered out. Data were displayed on a map of forest districts retrieved from the Forest Data Bank (https://www.bdl.lasy.gov.pl/; accessed January 6, 2024) using QGIS 3.34 Prizren (http://www.qgis.org).

Figure 1

Sampling sites in Stołowe Mountains National Park. Red crosses – specimen sampling sites; blue crosses – observation registration sites; black dots – major villages or cities; dark grey – national park; white continuous lines – municipal boundaries, names of municipalities are given in white; Czechia is depicted in white. Upper left corner: contour map of Poland showing the location of Stołowe Mountains National Park.

The nomenclature was aligned using the GBIF species matching tool (https://www.gbif.org/tools/species-lookup), and later corrected to follow current name status registered in Mycobank (https://mycobank.org/; accessed 2025, November 24). For selected specimens, morphological identification was confirmed by sequencing of ITS rDNA, using standard DNA barcoding protocol (Schoch et al., 2012; White et al., 1990). The sequences obtained in this study were deposited in the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration under the following GenBank accession numbers: OR807107-OR807125. Voucher specimens were deposited in the Herbarium of the Faculty of Biology, University of Warsaw (WA). The data on species occurrences were also deposited in GBIF (Occurrence data­set, https://doi.org/10.15468/49xfns). Finally, the protective status of all records was annotated according to the Regulation of the Polish Minister of the Environment on the protection of fungal species (Dz.U. 2014 poz. 1408), the “Red­list of the macrofungi in Poland” (Wojewoda & Ławrynowicz, 2006), the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.iucnredlist.org/, 2020; accessed 2024, August 25), and the Digital Catalogue of Biodiversity of Poland (Piskorski et al., 2023; Wilk et al., 2023). All collected specimen records with metadata are also available in Supplementary Table S2, and observations with metadata are available in Supplementary Table S3.

Information on the distribution of fungal species in the Stołowe Mountains National Park was compiled based on Jagodziński et al. (2017), Jagodziński et al. (2021), Pietras et al. (2025), and GBIF (https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.yczef6; accessed on 20 August 2024). GBIF records created during this inventory with the iNaturalist app (https://www.inaturalist.org) and Danish Fungal Atlas (https://svampe.databasen.org/en/) were manually filtered. A table containing all species listed in these sources was created, and species names were standardized according to the current nomenclatural status in Mycobank (https://mycobank.org/; accessed November 3, 2025), which allowed duplicate records to be removed.

3. Results

The one-week inventory yielded 86 collections and 33 observations representing 13 Ascomycota and 106 Basidio­mycota species (119 species, 146 occurrences in total). ITS rDNA sequences were obtained for 14 specimens (adequate accession numbers are provided in Table S3). In this study, we did not find any strictly protected species (SP), and only one partially protected (PP) species in Poland (Sparassis brevipes Krombh.) was recorded. Additionally, we noted 18 fungal species listed on the “Red List of the macrofungi in Poland” in the following threat categories: six endangered (E), seven rare (R), four vulnerable (V), and one data-deficient (I). Five species of Russula detected in this study are listed in the Global IUCN Red List in the least-concern (LC) category (https://redlist.info/iucn/species_list/; accessed 2025, August 08). Finally, our study resulted in the discovery of 4 species new for Poland: Cortinarius polaris Høil., Cortinarius semiodoratus Rob.Henry, Cortinarius sommerfeltii Høil., Inocybe occulta Esteve-Rav., and Inocybe vaurasii Esteve-Rav., E.Larss. & Pancorbo, as well as 70 species that were not previously reported in Stołowe Mountains National Park (as checked in published species lists by Jagodziński et al., 2017; Jagodziński et al., 2021; Pietras et al., 2025; and GBIF database, https://doi.org/10.15468/dl.yczef6; accessed on 20 August 2024).

In the list of recorded species, those for which specimens were collected are in bold, and the rest of the records are based on observations. The following abbreviations and symbols are used in the list of species. Record character: protection status: PP – partially protected species; Ex, E, V, and R – categories of threat according to the “Red list of the macrofungi in Poland” (Wojewoda & Ławrynowicz, 2006); DD, CR, VU, and LC – categories of threat according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (https://www.­iucnredlist.org/, 2020); *– taxon not previously reported from the Stołowe Mountains National Park; ** – taxon not previously reported from Poland.

Figure 2

Selected fungi from Stołowe Mountains National Park one common species (A) and three that were recorded for the first time in Poland (B–D): A. Cortinarius bolaris (Pers.) Zaw. (photo Tereza Ježková); B. Cortinarius sommerfeltii Høil. (photo Alma Njeri Agha); C. Cortinarius semiodoratus Rob.Henry (photo Jacob Heilmann-Clausen); D. Inocybe occulta Esteve-Rav. (photo Tereza Ježková).

4. Discussion

5. Conclusions

The short-term inventory performed herein has broadened the knowledge about the mycobiota of Stołowe Mountains National Park. Here, 70 species that have been recorded for the first time in the park are reported. This constitutes over 15% of the fungal species reported from Stołowe Mountains National Park. This result indicates that the diversity of the mycobiota remains understudied in comparison with other national parks.

Supplementary material

The following supplementary material is available for this article:

Table S1. List of species reported from Stołowe Mountains National Park.

Table S2. Detailed table of all specimen records with metadata.

Table S3. Detailed table of all observation records with associated metadata.

Acknowledgments

We thank the Stołowe Mountains National Park for supporting the inventory coordination.

We acknowledge the data collection contributions of participants in the Field Mycology Course: from the University of Warsaw: Magdalena Fus, Jakub Guzek, Anna Jurczyk, Grzegorz Ostrowski, Weronika Pokładek; from the University of Kopenhagen: Alma Njeri Agha, Anne Sofie Lawætz Andersen, Sanjana Sudheer Bhat, Oliver Velano Hessel, Andreas Christian H. Lausen, Mathilde Krarup Nilsson; from Heidelberg University: Ben Brick, Laura Schütz; and from Charles University in Prague: Tereza Ježková, Pavel Jirkovský, Magda Podlešáková.

We also thank Felix Vissing for helping us to translate notes from the Danish Fungal Atlas.

We thank Tereza Ježková for language correction.

We thank the reviewers for their contributions to this article.

This activity was organised as part of the 4EU+ Alliance cooperation, with the participation of member universities: University of Warsaw, Charles University, University of Copenhagen and Heidelberg University.