ABSTRACT
Mushrooms are macrofungi well known for their culinary and medicinal value-form ancient times. These are an imperative part of our ecosystem as well as the food system. Numerous species of mushrooms are grown wildly in forest ecosystems. These wildly present mushrooms have been used as a food delicacy in many parts of the world, especially on eastern continents. Extensive research work has been done in the past few decades on wild mushrooms, which give significant information about their cultivation methods and nutritional and medicinal values. In addition to nutritional and medicinal properties, wild mushrooms also play an important role in waste management i.e. bioremediation. However, lots of species of wild mushrooms remain unexplored in this vast biodiversity of the earth. Hence, there is a need to discover the unexplored wealth of wild mushrooms to exploit them as substitutes for several nutritional and medicinal compounds. This chapter mainly highlights the basic information of mushrooms and on the facts and data before presenting the cultivation of wild mushrooms and their impact on human beings and the ecosystem.
