As of 2015, the project is based at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, one of three partners along with Landcare Research and the Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[1] As of 2023, over a million fungal names have been linked to persistent identifiers for their associated publications across these three databases, with Index Fungorum contributing significantly to this effort.
One of the earliest comprehensive attempts was Pier Andrea Saccardo's "Sylloge Fungorum" (1882–1931), which aimed to compile all known fungal names and their descriptions.
In the 20th century, Franz Petrak's "Lists" (1920-1939) continued this tradition, providing a comprehensive index of new fungal names and literature sources.
As part of this transition, Index Fungorum is developing an automated registration-to-publication pipeline in collaboration with other major taxonomic name registries.
[4] Since January 1, 2013, new fungal names must cite an identifier issued by a recognized repository prior to publication, as mandated by the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants.
The database covers a wide range of nomenclatural acts, including new taxa at all ranks from suprafamilial to infraspecific, new replacement names, new combinations, and various types of typifications.
[6] The main part of Index Fungorum is intended to be a global list of all fungal names which have ever been validly defined, but many of them are conflicting or no longer used.
This automated process is designed to work with publishers' systems, allowing for efficient pre-publication registration of fungal names.
In recent years, this has led to the development of online registration systems like MycoBank, which work alongside Index Fungorum to ensure that new fungal names are properly recorded and made available to the scientific community.
[5] To facilitate the accurate recording and retrieval of fungal nomenclature data, Index Fungorum recommends specific standards for specimen metadata.