ABSTRACT
Why is it that it took three people to edit this third edition of The Fungal Community when it has so eloquently been done by two people in the past? Are we so much less competent? Perhaps so, but we would like to think that in the interval between the last edition and this a number of new technological advances have been made, allowing us to have more tools, or toys, to play with to study fungi and fungal communities, and we are not all familiar with all methods available. Thus, among us, we hope that we have assembled a mixture of authors who can address some of the questions regarding the observations, characterizations, and functional attributes of fungal assemblages and their interactions with both the environment and other organisms. In addition, the ecological literature has expanded to ask questions of global and local biodiversity, highlight the problems of exotic species, reopen the debate about diversity and function, and become more aware of the functional rather than taxonomic methods of classification.
