Damon Tighe

Damon Tighe is a naturalist and biotechnology educator in California. In 2004 he ran out of food on a 350 km trek and found mushrooms along the way, but didn't know enough to eat them and made a promise to learn more about them. 20 years later he's fallen head over heels for their diversity and avidly documents, sequences, eats, and cultivates them. Generally curious about biodiversity and community science, he is a major user of the iNaturalist platform for species documentation and has nearly 100,000 observations from across the globe. He's used the platform to drive conservation efforts and respond to ecological crises. A harmful algal bloom in the San Francisco bay whose ramifications were captured in iNaturalist data due to his organizing is causing the biggest change to laws around nutrient levels entering the estuary since the Clean Water Act of 1972. Understanding ecosystems inspires designs for nutrient cycling around a small plot of land that he and his wife live on where native oyster mushroom cultivation using just focused sunlight is used in combination with compost to cycle most of the biomass on the property and build soil. He has previously worked on the Human Genome Project, been a high school teacher, a primary collector for the California Fungal Diversity Survey project, and an organizer at the California Center for Natural History.