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Scientists from the United States and Europe announced plans Tuesday to create the biggest map of underground fungal networks, arguing they are an important but overlooked piece in the puzzle of how to tackle climate change.
By working with local communities around the world, the researchers will collect 10,000 DNA samples to determine how the vast networks that fungi create in the soil are changing as a result of human activity.
Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Amsterdam's Free University and co-founder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, said thatFungi are invisible engineers and their loss has gone largely unnoticed by the public.
She said that new research and climate models show that the Earth's survival is linked to the underground.
Tracking how the mycelia are affected by climate change is important for protecting them and ensuring they can contribute to nature's own mechanisms for removing carbon dioxide from the air.
Plants can grow faster and store carbon in the trillions of miles of root-like mass they themselves weave underground if Fungi can provide them with the right nutrition.
While having better fungi maps would be useful for future efforts, it was unclear how the researchers planned to go about that vast challenge, according to an expert not involved in the project.
She said that this is not trivial on a global scale.
The role of climate change and the fact that many fungi don't provide any benefits to plants or grow as underground networks merit investigation.
If some fungi release more CO2 into the atmosphere than they capture, global warming could be caused.
Anne Pringle is a professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said that a massive and coordinated effort to collect biodiversity data on a global scale is badly needed and will be very welcome.
The impact that a hotter planet will have on the spread of harmful species needs to be considered.
Pringle said that when talking about food security in a changing climate, you really want to think about the diseases that may become more prevalent on the planet.
The group, which is supported by a $3.5 million donation from the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust, chose to focus its mapping project on the relationship between plants and fungi.
More information can be found on the SPUN website.
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Scientists to map and determine climate role, retrieved 30 November 2021.
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