The Fungi Universe by Julia Johansson

The Fungi Universe visualizes the fungi taxonomy in a circular dendrogram that spans from moulds to edible mushrooms. Each taxonomy level builds outward with a lighter shade of grey for subkingdom, phylum, and subphylum and then stops after classes. This approach allowed us to fit the 74 classes on one sheet. Below class level (order, family, genus), the names are often similar to their class name.

How to organize open data on millions of fungi was an intriguing problem that eventually came down to manually building a spreadsheet from a research paper and cross-checking it with other sources. The fungi taxonomy changes rapidly, so we named it 'A Taxonomy Snapshot'. For more context we put highlights from major evolutionary branches next to the visualization. We then hand-illustrated the examples and wrote fun explanatory texts beside them. We took great care to approach the project from a global worldview, how and which examples we chose and their naming conventions.

We created this work to satisfy our curiosity and to spread awareness of fungi together with science, it was not commissioned. We first thought of creating a digital version. However, screen size quickly became a problem. We then decided to print it in a rather large Swedish format 70x100 cm.

The Fungi Universe is a project by Order Order Studio.