Tag Archive for: fungi

When Discussing Flora and Fauna, Don’t Forget ‘Funga’

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Fungi. They grow between toes, on bread and in the shower. But the organisms also produce food and medicine and act as ecosystem maids by decomposing dead matter — benefits that are sometimes overlooked (SN: 11/17/20). That’s why the Fungi Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to fungi education and conservation, advocates for adding “funga” to the popular phrase “flora and fauna.”

The mushrooming movement is also backed by the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which in August called for the addition of “a third ‘F’ — funga — to address the planetary challenges of climate change and biodiversity loss.” More than 20 countries already use the term, including Australia, Iceland and Brazil.

Historically, fungi have been left out of most conservation discussions and plans, says mycologist Giuliana Furci, founder of the Fungi Foundation, which was created in Chile and is now based in the United States. While flora refers to an area’s plant diversity and fauna its animal diversity, fungi don’t fit into either category.

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Mycelium: Exploring the Hidden Dimension of Fungi

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What is mycelium?

You might have seen mycelium before as a fuzzy, white, green or even black mass growing on mouldy food, blue cheese or salami.

But out in the wild, mycelium is more than just the sign of an out-of-date sandwich: it’s a whole network of thin fungal strands called hyphae.

The mycelium has a similar function in fungi to the roots of plants.

The hyphae explore the soil or any other substrate where fungi are growing and secrete digestive enzymes onto their food source, often dead organic materials and sometimes living organisms.

These enzymes break down the matter into smaller parts that feed not only the fungi, but also their plant partners and many other organisms. They can also ferment foods, increasing palatability.

In fact, this process of breaking down organic matter is critical in maintaining healthy soil, recycling leaf litter, and providing food for the vast array of bacteria and animals that call soil home.

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Can Soil Inoculation Accelerate Carbon Sequestration in Forests?

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When foresters first tried to plant non-native Pinus radiata in the southern hemisphere, the trees would not grow until someone thought to bring a handful of soil from the native environment. “They didn’t know it then, but they were reintroducing the spores of fungi that these trees need in order to establish,” Colin Averill, ecologist at The Crowther Lab, explains. “When we plant trees, we rarely ‘plant’ the soil microbiome. But if we do, we can really accelerate the process of restoration.”

That process of restoration has become one of humanity’s most urgent missions. In order to slow global warming, we know that we need to decarbonize our economy and start removing carbon from the atmosphere – and we’ve largely been looking at doing so through dreams of negative emissions technologies and schemes of tree-planting.

But only very recently has more attention been turned toward another major potential tool for carbon capture: soil. An astonishing 80 percent of the carbon stored in terrestrial ecosystems is stored underground. According to the 4 per 1000 Initiative, a modest and achievable increase in soil carbon of 0.4 percent could be enough to stop the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

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Soil Fungi Act like a Support Network for Trees, Study Shows

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Being highly connected to a strong social network has its benefits. Now a new University of Alberta study is showing the same goes for trees, thanks to their underground neighbours.

The study, published in the Journal of Ecology, is the first to show that the growth of adult trees is linked to their participation in fungal networks living in the forest soil.

Though past research has focused on seedlings, these findings give new insight into the value of fungal networks to older trees–which are more environmentally beneficial for functions like capturing carbon and stabilizing soil erosion.

“Large trees make up the bulk of the forest, so they drive what the forest is doing,” said researcher Joseph Birch, who led the study for his PhD thesis in the Faculty of Agricultural, Life & Environmental Sciences.

When they colonize the roots of a tree, fungal networks act as a sort of highway, allowing water, nutrients and even the compounds that send defence signals against insect attacks to flow back and forth among the trees.

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Fungi Have Unexpected Role to Play in Fight Against Climate Change

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TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Planting more trees seems like a logical way of counteracting climate change, as forests facilitate carbon sequestration, the process of capturing and storing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), but as efforts to remove CO2 from the atmosphere intensify, organisms from another kingdom — fungi — are showing they have an indispensable role to play in this process.

“Almost all plant life coexists with fungi during a certain period, if not the entire life cycle of a plant, but the reasons for this coexistence and its effects have not yet been fully deciphered,” said Ko-Hsuan “Koko” Chen, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Biodiversity Research Center. Her lab studies plant-fungal symbiosis, especially between fungi and early photosynthetic organisms such as mosses.

Funguses are commonly used as ingredients in food and in medicines. However, their dynamic relationship with plants is not so well known and is significantly tied to the prosperity of plant species and element cycles, which are defined as the biogeochemical pathways in which elements are transformed by natural processes.

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