Margit Babos

Margit Babos (maiden name Margit Greskovits, 1931–2009) was a Hungarian mycologist born on 28 October 1931 in Budapest. She became one of the most widely recognized mycologists in the second half of the 20th century in Eastern Europe, with contributions to mycological research, fungal taxonomy and recording the mycoflora of Hungary.

Babos joined the plant herbarium of the Hungarian Natural History Museum in 1951, first as a curator in the paleobotany department, then in the phycology department. In 1954, she joined the Mycology Department under the supervision of Dr. Gábor Bohus. They adopted the modified Herpell exsiccation method which resulted in well-preserved dried specimens of fungi. Although this was a tedious method and often required the process to be started in the field, Babos prepared more than 20,000 Herpell-exsiccata, which forms a valuable part of the fungus collection of the Hungarian National History Museum.

Shortly after joining the Mycology Department, she started participating in ongoing research activities, which mostly focused on recording and cataloguing the mushroom flora of Hungary and the renovation and organization of the Fungal Herbarium. She was promoted as a major museologist of the Hungarian National History Museum.

Her research resided around the fungal flora of the continental sand dune systems in Hungary. She performed extensive field work and collecting of fungi in several sites with moving sand dunes, dry sandy grasslands, wet and marshy interdune habitats and dry steppe forests in Hungary. Many of her research sites belonged to the Kiskunság National Park or the Hortobágy National Park and the knowledge gathered still forms the basis of our understanding of the European continental sand dune mycoflora. She made extensive comparisons with coastal, halophilic sand dunes and was always delighted by the high species overlap between these habitats despite great geography distances. She has reported the occurrence in Hungary many of the species described from coastal sand dunes in France and Spain, most of which were new for the Hungarian mycoflora.

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