question 10: Presence of a ring

The ring is often, as its name suggests, a kind of collar surrounding the stem in its upper half. If present, this constitutes an important feature for the identification. There are several types of rings (simple, double, ascending,k descending, sheathing, mobile, etc.), but we will essentially consider three cases:

• "the presence of a membranous ring", when the ring is visible and membranous;
• "the presence of a short-lived ring or ring zone", when the ring is fragile ans disappears quickly, or is hardly visible and reduced to a darker zone on the stem where it vanishes;
• "no ring and no ring zone", in all other cases ;

The system is capable of taking into account the transitions between these various possibilities, but it may prove useful to verify significant features (like here the presence of ring) by checking several specimens of the same mushroom to identify whenever possible. When in doubt, we can always select "I don't know" to prevent the system from using this criterion at all to compare candidate mushrooms. The presence (or absence) of a ring being a very characteristic feature, we can also here impose this criterion as a mandatory feature in the results output by the identification search engine. For example, if the unknown mushroom has an obvious membranous ring, by ticking both "yes, membranous ring" and "force selected answer to criterion", we will exclude all mushrooms without a ring from the results produced by the search engine.

Examples:

The ring is here hardly visible, but we can see a ring zone, select then "yes, fragile ring or ring zone " in this case		The ring is here obvious and membranous, select then "yes, membranous ring" in this case		The ring is here reduced to a small band, but still present, select then "yes, fragile ring or ring zone" in this case		The ring is here almost disappeared but still there, select then "yes, fragile ring or ring zone" in this case
The ring is here membranous, select then "yes, membranous ring" in this case		The ring is here membranous and very clear (actually, it is a sheathing ring), select then "yes, membranous ring" in this case		The ring is membranous although small here, select then "yes, membranous ring" in this case		There is no ring here, even a ring zone is totally absent, select then "no, no ring" in this case

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