- Proposed
- Under Assessment
- Preliminary Assessed
- Assessed
- LCPublished
Cantharellus rhodophyllus Heinem.
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- Scientific name
- Cantharellus rhodophyllus
- Author
- Heinem.
- Common names
- IUCN Specialist Group
Mushroom, Bracket and Puffball- Kingdom
- Fungi
- Phylum
- Basidiomycota
- Class
- Agaricomycetes
- Order
- Cantharellales
- Family
- Cantharellaceae
- Assessment status
- Published
- Assessment date
- 2023-02-07
- IUCN Red List Category
- LC
- Assessors
- James Westrip (IUCN Red List Unit)
- Reviewers
- Anders Dahlberg (Swedish Species Information Centre, Uppsala / IUCN SSC Cup-fungus, Truffle and Ally Specialist Group)
Assessment Notes
The content on this page is fetched from The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/227573643/269712586
Justification
There is a degree of taxonomic confusion with regards to the use of this binomial, with scattered reports from three different continents. Getting clear identifications of specimens, and getting a conclusive decision on the taxonomic position of Cantharellus rhodophyllus and C. subincarnatus will be useful. In this assessment, though, they are considered as synonymous. Based on the known records and the species’ potential ecological requirements, it is likely to be widespread through Central Africa. Therefore, even with the current taxonomic confusion, this species is not thought to approach the thresholds for listing as threatened under any criterion and is assessed as Least Concern.Taxonomic notes
There is taxonomic uncertainty regarding this binomial, in particular its affiliation with Cantharellus subincarnatus. Index Fungorum Partnership (2023) treats both as accepted species, whereas a recent taxonomic study (Buyck and Hofstetter 2018) has suggested that subspecies C. s. subsp. rubrosalmoneus should be split as a separate species, while the nominate subspecies C. s. subsp. subincarnatus actually is a synonym of Cantharellus rhodophyllus.Geographic range
The type specimen of this species was collected at Binga, northern Democratic Republic of Congo (Heinemann 1958). The epitype for the species was collected in Dzanga-Sangha Forest Reserve, southern Central African Republic, under Gilbertiodendron dewevrei (Buyck and Hofstetter 2018). As such it could have a wide distribution across equatorial forest in Central Africa. There is some taxonomic uncertainty around this concept though, depending on whether Cantharellus subincarnatus is treated as a synonym or not of C. rhodophyllus (Buyck and Hofstetter 2018 place it as a synonym, but Index Fungorum Partnership 2023 does not). Irrespective of this, though, given the known records of this species within Africa, it is possible to suspect a wide range, and there are non-georeferenced records from Gabon and Cameroon (GBIF 2023).Records described as C. subincarnatus come from Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon (e.g. Ndong et al. 2011), with records for the synonym, C. incarnatus, from Cameroon and Zambia (Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh 2021a,b), although the Cameroon localities descriptions refer to Zambian place names, so it is assumed that these are labelled in error.
The species has also been included in a list of Colombian macrofungi (Vasco-Palacios and Franco-Molano (2012), and for the Himalayas (Kumari et al. 2011); although these records would represent significant extensions to the range, and probably require further research to verify them. GBIF records from Madagascar potentially do not represent this species, especially given the taxonomic uncertainty between this species and C. subincarnatus, with C. s. subsp. rubrosalmoneus (only known from Madagascar) being treated here as a separate species (per Buyck and Hofstetter 2018). The provided map is based on georeferenced localities only, and so can be treated as incomplete.
Population and Trends
The population size and trend are essentially unknown.
Population Trend: Unknown