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Everything's Connected

Fungal Ecology from the Sea to the Sky


Do you want to understand everything that fungi do in nature?


I know how confusing it is to unravel mycology's finer details. With few resources for studying fungal ecology available to the average person, the powerful, fascinating, and critical roles that fungi provide in the environment have historically, and unfortunately, been seen as a mystery-to-ignore by most scientists, naturalists, and environmentalists.

To help you break through this barrier and dive into the richness of all that fungi offer, I have condensed a lifetime of study on the topic into this meticulously crafted course to help you fully understand – and see – the world's fungi in all their glory. This is a potent, eye-opening study and one that deserves the longer session we are providing it in our course catalog.

I hope you are inspired and empowered by the new paradigms that it holds for you!


—Peter McCoy

MYCOLOGOS Founder and Mycomind

Everything's Connected:
Fungal Ecology from the Sea to the Sky

Start Date: July 9
Duration: 14 weeks, with new material released on Tuesday of each week
(See below for full details on the course's structure)

It is no exaggeration to suggest that fungi – not plants nor animals – are the greatest architects of the natural world. Though such a notion may seem unbelievable at first, even a short study of all that fungi do in the environment can quickly lead to this perspective. Found from the bottom of the ocean to the heart of the Sonora desert, fungi are powerful, adaptive, and integral to their greater environment wherever they are found. They enrich soils, form complex symbioses with plants and animals, and help ensure that any environment can bounce back from even the greatest damage. No matter the constraint, fungi offer unique abilities to support their habitat and those they share it with to find a more resilient and healthier way forward.

In this course, you will learn about these numerous fungal functions to a professional and collegiate level, along with the hands-on skills needed to observe, document, and engage with the fungi around you. By the end of the course you will have developed a mycological lens for viewing and interpreting the health of any environment – a rarely encountered skill set that is essentially unavailable in schools and universities around the world, yet is critical for a truly holistic understanding of ecosystem dynamics. Whether you weave these skills into your love for the outdoors, couple them with research endeavors in the natural sciences, or fold them into a nature-based career path, we are sure the insights provided in this course will open new lines of thought for a lifetime or fungi-filled inquiry and discovery.



Course Overview


WEEK 1: Welcome to the World of Fungi

Orientation • Course Objectives • Fungal Evolution Introduction • Fungal Ecology History • Fungi in Traditional Ecological Knowledge • Current Frontiers • Why Study Fungal Ecology? • Rewilding with Fungi

WEEK 2: Fungi + Ecology

Fungal Biology • Mycological Terms & Concepts • Ecological Concepts • Fungi in Succession • Symbiosis • Mycomimicry • Human Disturbances & Fungi • Resiliency • Soils Pt. 1 • Fungal Ecological Roles Introduction • Honing the Mycological Lens (Landscape Reading)

WEEK 3: Fungi in Nutrient Cycling

Nutrient Cycling Introduction • Soils Pt. 2 • Carbon Cycle • Fungi & Climate Change • Nitrogen Cycle • Water Cycle • Phosphorus & Fungi • Minerals & Geomycology

WEEK 4: Lichens as Landscape

Lichenology Introduction • Lichen Structure • Lichens in Forests • Lichens in Drylands • Lichens as Habitat Indicators • Lichen-like Relationships • Surveying Lichens

WEEK 5: Animal–Fungal Relations

Fungi in the Human Gut • Human Mycobiome • Other Beneficial Human-Fungus Interactions • Fungi & Mammals • Fungi & Insects • Mycophagy in the Animal Kingdom

WEEK 6: Fungi–Plant Symbioses

Endophytic Fungi • Class 1 • Class 2 • Class 3 • Class 4 • Epiphytic Fungi • Microscopy for Endophytic Fungi Introduction • Mycorrhizal Fungi Introduction

WEEK 7: Mycorrhizal Fungi!

Ectomycorrhizal Mushrooms & Truffles • Desert Truffles •  Ericoid • Orchidaceous • Mycoheterotrophy • Monotropoid • Arbutoid • Ecto-Endo • Mycorrhizal-like Relationships

WEEK 8: All About Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi

History • Biology • Arbuscule Formation • Nutrient Exchanges • Isolation from Soil • Identification Introduction • Glomalin • Roles in Mycoremediation

WEEK 9: Vocal Fungi – Plant Infections

History • Famous Blights • Ecological Value • Influence on Timber and Other Industries • Mitigation Introduction • Rusts • Smuts • Powdery Mildew • Downy Mildew • Root Rot • Wilts

WEEK 10: Vocal Fungi – Animal Infections

Insect Infections (Entomopathogenic Fungi) • Nematode Infections (Nematophageous Fungi) • Reptile Infections • Mammal Infections • Human Infection

WEEK 11: Decomposing (and Recomposing) Fungi

Decomposition Cycles & Succession Introduction • Fungi & Carbon Budgeting • Mycorrhizal Decomposers • Chytridiomycotan Fungi • Zygomycetes • Dung-Lovers • Soil Molds • Soil Yeasts

WEEK 12: The Beauty of Wood Decay

Evolution of Wood Decay • Lignification & Delignification • Deadwoodology Intro • Wood Decay Succession • Brown Rot • White Rot • Soft Rot • Relevance in Mycoremediation

WEEK 13: Other Fungal Niches

Fungi in the Garden • Fungi in Compost • Human Habitat Fungi • Slime and Water Molds • Aquatic Fungi • Extreme Fungi • Antarctic Fungi • Atmospheric and Outer Space Fungi

WEEK 14: Conclusion

Seeing Fungi • Next Steps

Join Anytime!

You can join this course at any time, with new material released to you each week, including video instructions, readings, project and activity descriptions.


Life Skills You Will Learn

Upon completing this course you will be well-equipped to study, describe, and assess the roles fungi are fulfilling in any environment. Specific insights and skills you will be able to apply after this course include:
  • Enhance any animal, plant, or ecological research with a fungal analysis – something that is often not covered at all in most learning institutions
  • Walk in any environment and fully appreciate and describe the myriad of fungal functions happening all around you
  • Describe in detail how fungi significantly influence carbon, nitrogen, water, and other nutrient cycles on the planet
  • Promote fungal growth to improve soil carbon storage and mitigate climate change
  • Design and manage habitats that are mycologically sound and fungi-promoting
  • Interpret lichen diversity as an indicator of air quality and environmental health
  • Observe plant-symbiotic fungi under a microscope
  • Discuss fungal ecology with anyone

What You Receive

Enrollment in this course provides you with these offerings:
  • One year of streaming access to the entire course content, including video lectures and demonstrations, field recordings, reference and resource documents, and more!
  • Lifetime access to this course’s section on the MYCOLOGOS® web forum where you can share ideas, questions, and success stories with a global community of fellow fungi enthusiasts
  • Study and reference materials, and experiential projects related to each week’s content
  • Instructions, materials lists, and support for projects to be done in home, in the field, and in your community
  • Upon completion, a Certificate from MYCOLOGOS recognizing your comprehension of course materials and completion of the course’s requirements. Learn more about our Certificates of Completion here


The total value of these information-packed fourteen weeks of training, support, and resources could easily cost over $3,000 at other institutions!

Ways to Join

You can sign up for this course at any time as enrollment is ongoing. To register, simply sign up at the link below. Within 1–2 business days, you will receive registration information to set up your account on the MYCOLOGOS Courses Portal, where the videos and other course content will be made available, and on the MYCOLOGOS Community Forum, where you can share ideas and research with your class peers.

You will then have access to the course's contents for a full year, during which time you can engage with the material and the associated projects and assignments at your own pace.

Once you are registered, new course content will be provided to your account on the MYCOLOGOS Courses Portal each week, and an email will be sent to you when the new content is available. You will be able to download all of the course’s texts and supplementary materials, though course videos will only be available online, so you will need a reliable internet connection (whether on your smart phone or computer) to watch them.

Who This Course is For

This course is ideal for anyone interested in understanding the important and awe-inspiring roles that fungi fulfill in the environment, including:
  • Fungi enthusiasts and mushroom hunters who want to go deeper into their appreciation for fungi
  • Naturalists and Citizen Scientists wishing to learn all they can about the mycological wonders of the world
  • Outdoor educators and park rangers wanting to fill the fungal gap in their knowledge set and educational curriculum
  • Conservationists seeking mycological insights on habitat disturbances and protection strategies
  • Soil scientists wishing to enrich their understanding on the roles fungi fulfill below ground
  • Permaculturalists, urban farmers, and organic farmers seeking a comprehensive description of the many fungal functions in the environment
  • Arborists and tree planters desiring a clear understanding of tree-fungus interactions
  • Restoration ecologists needing fungi-informed landscape assessment strategies
  • Botanists, wildlife biologists, entomologists, marine biologists, geologists, and mineralogists wishing to complement their expertise with fungi-centric paradigms
  • Parents who wish to engage their children in the natural roles that fungi offer

Get Certified!


This course aims to make you not just familiar with fungal ecology, but well-equipped to assess, describe, and inform others about the topic for the rest of your life. To provide the best learning experience, we are including various homework assignments to help reinforce the information covered in the video instruction. These additional learning tools are optional, but in order to meet the requirements for certification, you can expect to spend approximately 1–3 hours researching, planning, or foraging for every hour of instruction.

At a minimum, students seeking certification will complete several quizzes and readings (from books purchased online or acquired through a library), create a survey of the macro and micro fungi in their local environment, facilitate one community-oriented project related to fungal ecology (various options for this will be provided in the first week of the course), and to document their practice of various skills presented throughout the course. Students will have one year after the course ends to complete these assignments and submit their final portfolio for review.

Full details on Certification requirements will be provided in the first week of the course.

You can learn more about our Certificates here.

Register Now

Payment Plan Price


$199



Made in 4 monthly installments

Register Now

Full Tuition Price


$699



Pay in full and save!

Register Now





Money-Back Guarantee

If you're not fully satisfied, we'll refund your tuition within 72 hours of enrollment, no questions asked.



Do you want to fully appreciate fungi for all they do?


One of the most transformative ways of engaging with fungi is to witness the many gifts they offer the world – from the inner world of our bodies, to the freshest juniper tips in the Boreal forests of the north. We personally know how humbling and inspiring the study of fungal ecology can be. It opens your eyes to new layers of the world and offers many powerful solutions for designing and regenerating our landbases and watersheds. It shakes our understanding of the world in a good way – nay, an excellent way! – and turns each of its students into a Fungal Ambassador ready to celebrate fungi at any turn of the trail.

In this course we will help you not only understand these connections, but provide you with a rich tool set for embracing them in any aspect of life – whether you’re a naturalist, researcher, environmentalist, or steward of Mother Earth!

Have a Question?

Check Our FAQs


This course’s core objective is to make you highly literate in the many aspects of fungal ecology (i.e. what fungi do in the natural world). Through guided studies, tests, experiential projects, and other coursework you will develop competency in the topics listed at the top of this page, giving you a skill set and knowledge base that is currently very rare globally. The insights provided will enable you to enrich your personal engagement with nature, as well as open new possibilities for academic exploration or career development.
Prior to the start of the course, you will receive login information to the MYCOLOGOS Courses Portal, where the course videos are hosted, and the MYCOLOGOS Community Forum, where discussion takes place. You will also receive a welcome video at that time that will familiarize you with these online platforms.

Once the course starts you will receive weekly emails linking you to new course content (e.g. videos, downloads, instructionals, and supplementary resources).
The new content released each week is prerecorded and not streamed live, so there is no need to dedicate a specific time window to watching the content each week. Each Tuesday you will receive an email notifying you that new content is available on the MYCOLOGOS Courses Portal for this course. You will have all week to engage with the content at your own pace before the new content is released. If you don’t complete a given week’s new material, you will still have access to the material for the year that you are enrolled, so you can always complete it later.
Not at all! You will have access to all the course’s contents for a full year, during which time you can engage with the material and any associated assignments at your own pace.
Starting in 2020, MYCOLOGOS will be offering partial scholarships for some of our online and in-person course and events. If you are not financially able to join our courses this year, please check back as details about our scholarship fund continue to develop.
No. All the course topics will be covered from the ground up and increase in complexity over the course’s length. While many of the topics may be new to you, they will presented in a manner that is engaging and approachable, contextualized to our modern lifestyle, and without the clutter of overly technical terminology.
Yes! Just as anyone can learn to appreciate birds, butterflies, or trees from anywhere in the world, so does fungal ecology translate to any environment (even moreso than birds, butterflies, and trees!). Fungi influence cloud formation, climate patterns, and essentially all of plant and animal health (including yours!). No matter what aspect of the natural world you already love, fungi are sure to enrich that appreciation, while opening your eyes to so much more!
Yes! Anyone is welcome to join the course, so long as they feel comfortable engaging in the topics and understand that we cannot offer language translation services at this time. We are excited to educate students around the world and invite you to join us wherever you are!
Information about our Certificates of Completion can be viewed here.
Yes, though students that join the course by July 9, 2019 will have the added benefit of a lower cost of tuition and the ability to submit questions to the weekly Q&A sessions.
Each student will receive access to a section of the MYCOLOGOS Community Forum for this course (2019 Everything’s Connected), where they can share questions, stories, insights, and more with their class peers. As with other online forums, there will be subthreads for specific topics covered in the course, so that information can be easily sorted and retrieved.
Students joining the course prior to July 9 will be able to submit questions online for a weekly Q&A session of each week’s topics. Students joining after that time will be encouraged to watch the recorded Q&A sessions and check the MYCOLOGOS Community Forum for their queries (in many cases, common questions have already been asked and archived for your convenience). If your question is not answered in either of those areas, you can email us directly.
We do offer a 10% discount per person when groups of 3 or more friends, family members, or colleagues sign up together. Please contact us if you wish to register with a group.
This course is the culmination of over a decade of dedicated research and teaching experience by Peter McCoy to create a robust, holistic, and one-of-a-kind course that is affordable. We ask that at all times you respect this time and energy investment by not sharing your login information or any of the course’s videos and original resources.

In joining this course you are also joining in a pact of mutual respect and trust, shared by you, Peter, and the other students wherein the information and personal accounts shared by all is held within the confines of the course unless otherwise stated. Peter and all of us at MYCOLOGOS thank you in advance for helping maintain the integrity of that pact and for helping ensure a longstanding, and ever-stronger community amongst all MYCOLOGOS students and alumni.

All that said, we want to make clear that we highly encourage you to share you own insights and discoveries that this course brings out and up for you in whatever capacity you desire. We need more Fungal Ambassadors in the world!
This course is a stand alone offering that cannot be broken up. If you are interested in just a portion of the topics listed above, you will need to join the whole course to access those parts. We hope, however, that by taking the entire course you will quickly find great value in the diversity of roles fungi offer and come to develop new-found appreciation for those aspects which may not have been of initial interest!
The projects related to the course are designed to be skill-building, but cost effective. Many of the projects require little more than pen, paper, and some means of magnification (which can be done with a smart phone). The required readings for the course will be from free resources or books that can likely be acquired through a library system. The optional suggested books (many of them technical tomes) can quickly sum to well over $1,000 if you as so inclined to add them to you library. But they are not necessary to complete or fully engage in the course’s core curriculum.

In all, it would be good to set aside US$100–300 for materials, travel costs (going in the woods, etc.), and miscellaneous resources related to the course. This cost can be much lower if you acquire your books from a library or already have some of the suggested supplies.
Not really. As surprising as it may be, fungal ecology is not a topic that is well-represented in the world’s educational institutions. Even in multi-year environment-based programs, students are often lucky to get more than a just a handful of days dedicated to fungi. This very unfortunate situation can be seen an outgrowth of the relatively short history of the field compared to other natural sciences, but it does not reflect the clear importance of the topic.

It is our hope that this course will help raise awareness of the vast importance of fungal ecology in our students and, through them, their peers so that in the future fungal ecology will be given the priority it deserves in the natural sciences. To our knowledge, our course is one of a kind and unlike anything else offered anywhere in the world.


Want to Know More?

Get in touch!





Register Now

Payment Plan Price


$199



Made in 4 monthly installments

Register Now

Full Tuition Price


$699



Pay in full and save!

Register Now





Money-Back Guarantee

If you're not fully satisfied, we'll refund your tuition within 72 hours of enrollment, no questions asked.

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Join our email list to receive updates about our courses