Dear Joanne, the French Mycologist Society is currently involved in the elaboration of the French Red List, in collaboration with the French committee of IUCN. The main problems are indeed to document species as much as possible according to the IUCN criteria, which are mostly speculative considering the cryptic life style of fungi; but also to distinguish threat from rarity, and we make a point to clear these notions out in our decisions.
Rarity is a subjective data (the probability for a fungi to be observed by someone), and is often dependant on the observer himself - many rare species are only difficult to observe, or to identify, or fruit sporadically, or with a sspecific ecology, but what is threatened in such case is competent mycologists, rather than fungi themselves. Red-listed species must be reasonably identificable by a non-specialized mycologist, because they need to be monitorable.
I think such a hurry call-to-proposals will lack methodological support, and therefore final credibility. But the question deserves discussion !
Best regards, Pierre-Arthur

Dear Pierre-Arthur, this initiative was launced over a year ago and some species are already in the process of being assessed using the IUCN Criteria for 2014. There are quite a few nominations on the website and this was just a call to nominate more before the 'deadline' for the 2015 assessments. As I point out in the paper that the full assessments for the global red list take a considerable time and this was a push to identify the 'low hanging fruit' i.e. the more obvious ones. This initiative has a finite life and the folk doing the assessments are putting in a lot of their time which is also finite! So while there is momentum and this process is in place it is an opportunity to get as many fungi red listed as possible, afterwhich the process of global red listing will be down to us again. Seeing as only 3 species have been red listed before, this process was put in place to raise awareness and show that there are fungi with conservation requirements.
As I pointed out in my letter, and you have outlined in you response, there are issues with the assessment of fungi, but equally there are also good candidates for assessment and it is these that the initiative aims to target.
All the best,
Jo

Dear PAM,
thanks for your statement that I fully support. The involvement of amateur mycologists is again and again requested, without any hope of financial compensation. In absence of qualified mycologists, any list, red or not is just paperwork.
Dear Joanne,
As suggested by PAM, please firtst take care of editing a red list of competent mycologists.
Good luck,
Jacques