The third edition of The Fungal Community has been compiled by a new set of editors. The three of us were impressed with the quality and content of the previous two editions and hope that we have matched the work of George Carroll and Don Wicklow in this new volume. The aims and objectives of this volume are explained in our introductory chapter, but in brief, we have tried to address some of the current discussions in ecology (diversity and function, scaling issues, disturbance, invasive species) from a fungal perspective. In order to be able to address these issues, we need appropriate techniques to identify fungi, determine their abundance,.
