 The appearance of a specimen at a 1994 mushroom foray in North Carolina resulted in a collaboration between mycologists Tom Volk, Orson K. Miller, Jr. and Alan Bessette, who renamed the species Leucopholiota decorosa in a 1996 Mycologia publication. Leucopholiota was originally a subgenus of Armillaria, but the authors raised it to generic level to accommodate L. decorosa, which would become the type species. In 2008, Henning Knudsen considered L. decorosa to be the same species as what was then known as Amylolepiota lignicola, and considered the two names to be synonymous. However, Finnish mycologist Harri Harmaja rejected this interpretation. Originally, Harmaja believed Lepiota lignicola sufficiently distinct from other similar taxa to deserve its own genus Amylolepiota, which he described in a 2002 publication. He changed his mind in 2010, writing "the differences between the type species of both genera are small and are thus best considered as differences at the species level"; with this he transferred the taxon to Leucopholiota, and it is now known as Leucopholiota lignicola, the second species in genus Leucopholiota.
