The honest answer is: we don’t know. Mycologist Thom Kuyper therefore wants to set up a nice education project on the topic, together with experts from other disciplines. The idea came up after Kuyper gave a guided tour of the campus recently to De Wandelende Tak [the walking branch), a student group from the Forest and Nature Policy programme. On the walk Kuyper counted 51 species of toadstool in no more than an hour.
This diversity raises the question of quite how much biodiversity there is on the campus. Kuyper: ‘It would be a very nice project to inventory that together with students. It is of course remarkable that as a life sciences university, we don’t know this exactly. So Kuyper wants to work with others to make a project of it. Those with good ideas as to how to get such a project off the ground should contact him
Photo: Erika van Gennip