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Fungi, Carbon, And The Climate Risk Map We Missed
Fungi, Carbon, And The Climate Risk Map We Missed

Forbes

time6 days ago

  • Science
  • Forbes

Fungi, Carbon, And The Climate Risk Map We Missed

Abundant worldwide, most fungi are inconspicuous because of the small size of their structures, and ... More their cryptic lifestyles in soil or on dead matter. Fungi include symbionts of plants, animals, or other fungi and also parasites. They may become noticeable when fruiting, either as mushrooms or as moulds. Fungi perform an essential role in the decomposition of organic matter and have fundamental roles in nutrient cycling and exchange in the environment. The discipline of biology devoted to the study of fungi is known as mycology (from the Greek μύκης mykes, mushroom). In the past, mycology was regarded as a branch of botany, although it is now known fungi are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants. Soil fungi may not have ticker symbols but they move carbon at planetary scale, drawing an estimated 13 billion tons of CO₂ into the soil each year, equivalent to nearly a third of global fossil fuel emissions. And yet, they've been almost entirely absent from climate risk models, ESG reports, and conservation agendas. Scientists from the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) have released the first-ever high-resolution global maps of mycorrhizal fungal biodiversity, alongside the launch of a groundbreaking public platform called the Underground Atlas. The research, published in the journal Nature, marks the first large-scale scientific application of the global mapping initiative launched by SPUN in 2021. Built using over 2.8 billion fungal DNA sequences from 130 countries, the Atlas reveals a profound oversight: more than 90% of the planet's most diverse underground carbon ecosystems are unprotected. 'Soils store 75% of Earth's terrestrial carbon and contain ~59% of Earth's biodiversity. Yet, we've neglected to map, monitor, and protect fungal systems,' says Dr. Toby Kiers, executive director of SPUN. 'With the Underground Atlas, we're making these invisible networks visible, and therefore measurable.' The Underground Carbon Crisis Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that connect and sustain over 90% of all terrestrial plant species, channelling nutrients, supporting food systems, biodiversity, and ecosystem resilience. Critically, they also draw carbon from plants into the soil, playing a major role in carbon sequestration and climate regulation. But until now, these fungal networks have gone unmapped and unmonitored, and the implications of this are significant. 'We were surprised to learn that fungal biodiversity didn't align with traditional conservation indicators like plant richness,' says Dr. Kiers. 'That means we're missing high-value underground ecosystems that are being degraded or lost, increasing global warming and disrupting nutrient cycles.' The Atlas will also be critical in leveraging fungi to regenerate degraded ecosystems. 'Restoration practices have been dangerously incomplete because the focus has historically been on life aboveground,' said Dr. Alex Wegmann a lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy. 'These high-resolution maps provide quantitative targets for restoration managers to establish what diverse mycorrhizal communities could and should look like." Urgent action is needed to incorporate findings into international biodiversity law and policy. For example, the Ghanaian coast is a global hotspot for mycorrhizal biodiversity. But the country's coastline is eroding at roughly two meters per year and scientists are concerned that such critical biodiversity could soon be washed into the sea. To build the Underground Atlas, SPUN and partners used machine learning models trained on billions of environmental DNA sequences, geospatial data, and climate variables. For the first time, decision-makers, restoration managers, and investors can explore mycorrhizal biodiversity at a 1km² scale, enabling them to identify high-value underground ecosystems that are critical to carbon cycling, crop resilience, and biodiversity. 'This is the most data-rich global compilation of fungal eDNA ever assembled,' says Dr. Michael Van Nuland, SPUN's lead data scientist. 'There just aren't many high-resolution global maps for soil organisms, especially for ecosystem engineers like fungi.' The Atlas can make biodiversity predictions even in unsampled areas, identifying fungal richness, rarity, and degradation risk. This will enable regulators and restoration practitioners to anticipate biodiversity loss and carbon vulnerability at a landscape scale. SPUN is already working with early adopters across conservation, restoration, and legal sectors, and has observer status at the upcoming UN COP16 biodiversity summit. Implications For ESG And Restoration The new maps reveal a critical blind spot for companies and governments relying on nature-based solutions, sustainable agriculture, and biodiversity finance. 'Conservation is about protecting the systems that sustain life, and those systems don't stop at the soil surface,' says Dr. Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at WWF. 'Healthy fungal networks are tied to higher aboveground biodiversity and greater ecosystem resilience.' Dr. Shaw says the maps should be incorporated into frameworks like the 30x30 biodiversity targets, National Biodiversity Strategies (NBSAPs), and even carbon markets. 'Much like the human gut microbiome transformed medicine, the soil microbiome is essential for planetary health,' she says. 'We must start incorporating these maps into our conservation plans, including at WWF.' She emphasizes that mycorrhizal fungi need to be recognized as a priority in the 'library of solutions' to some of the world's greatest challenges, biodiversity decline, climate change, and declining food productivity. 'They deliver powerful ecosystem services whose benefits flow directly to people. This research should help elevate the protection and restoration of fungi and their networks to the top of conservation priorities.' 'This research maps where fungal communities are thriving or under threat,' she continues. 'There is an opportunity to integrate this knowledge into decision-making about building resilience into our food systems.' These insights are also guiding restoration and corporate risk assessments. SPUN is currently piloting a project with a corporate partner to evaluate the use of mycorrhizal biodiversity assessments in material supply chains. 'This is helping us understand both the economic applications for our data and how these collaborations can contribute valuable information back to our global database,' says Dr. Van Nuland. Soil fungi aren't just climate assets, they're agricultural assets. Research shows mycelial networks can reduce nutrient leaching by up to 50% and supply up to 80% of a plant's phosphorus needs, positioning fungi as vital components of sustainable farming. Incorporating fungal biodiversity into agricultural planning offers a powerful hedge against food system risk, helping companies navigate fertilizer volatility, regulatory pressures, and the growing need to demonstrate climate-resilient practices. For businesses navigating nature risk, this may be the data layer they didn't know they needed. Soil fungi are also being considered in legal and regulatory contexts. 'Underground biodiversity is included in the Convention on Biological Diversity,' says César Rodríguez-Garavito, director of NYU's More-Than-Human Life Program. 'But in practice, policies have focused almost entirely on aboveground ecosystems.' Because fungal networks have been invisible in climate law, activities that disrupt them have gone largely unregulated, with serious consequences for carbon storage, soil health, and legal accountability. 'By making visible the presence of climate-significant soil fungi, this data can help prevent climate impacts that stem from their destruction,' he explains. A litigation toolkit is also in development with NYU Law to help Indigenous communities protect underground ecosystems threatened by extraction. Changing The Climate Narrative Beyond risk and regulation, the Underground Atlas offers something deeper: a new way of seeing and valuing ecosystems. 'Fungi have long been overlooked because they don't fit neatly into our mental models,' says Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, SPUN's director of impact and author of Entangled Life. 'These tools help us overcome that blindness and see fungi as living infrastructure.' The implications go beyond science or policy, they touch how we define intelligence, resilience and value in the natural world. While forests and coral reefs have long symbolized ecological richness, the quiet complexity of underground fungal networks has rarely captured public imagination or financial attention. That's beginning to change. 'When we understand that fungi store carbon, support biodiversity, and regulate water flows, we begin to grasp that protecting them is a matter of long-term value, not just ecological virtue.' Sheldrake argues that these maps are not just analytical tools, they are conceptual ones, helping businesses and governments see what sustainability has missed. Recognizing fungi as climate infrastructure could shift how nature is factored into risk models, insurance products, and even accounting frameworks in the years to come. Dr Van Nuland says that while the current launch represents the project's first major milestone, this is only the beginning. SPUN is currently working on more than 10 additional mapping pipelines that will expand the platform's capabilities, including maps of mycorrhizal carbon drawdown hotspots, underground threat assessments, and restoration potential analyses. 'We're only beginning to explore the economic and ecological uses of this data,' he says. 'We want to discover new applications and we're inviting researchers, funders, and policymakers to help us.' In a world increasingly focused on risk, resilience, and real assets, the lesson is clear: funghi, and the fungal networks beneath our feet, are the billion-ton blind spot we can no longer afford to ignore.

Country diary: An invasion of tiny fungi parachutists has landed overnight
Country diary: An invasion of tiny fungi parachutists has landed overnight

The Guardian

time14-07-2025

  • General
  • The Guardian

Country diary: An invasion of tiny fungi parachutists has landed overnight

There were none here yesterday, and by the end of tomorrow they'll have deliquesced and disappeared, but for now the neatly mown grass under our feet was studded with 2in-tall parasol inkcaps (Parasola plicatilis). They looked like an invasion of tiny parachutists; in reality they'd risen from the underworld. They were here all along, as a mycelium of microscopically slender hyphae, down among the grassroots. Autumn is the fungal forager's season but fungi, as hyphae or spores, are everywhere, unseen, all the time. Occasionally, driven by the imperative to reproduce, their ramifying network of independent threads collaborates, producing spores in toadstools. Some, like these inkcaps, are ephemeral; others, like the dryad's saddle (Cerioporus squamosus) we'd been watching since spring, grow from teacup to tea-tray proportions, slowly digesting dead wood, taking months to reach maturity. What changed overnight on this lawn, unseen, in the soil? Had several square yards of inkcap mycelium finally accumulated enough strategic reserves and sent signals fizzing along its underground network, with the order to send toadstools breaking through into the daylight? Was rain the trigger, a sudden downpour, softening sun-baked, droughted ground just enough for the fragile inkcaps to emerge? Fungi, evolutionarily closer to animals than to plants, behave in mysterious ways. Some, like the bright orange nettle clustercup rust (Puccinia urticata) that we found distorting stems and leaves of stinging nettles along the lane here, live complicated lives, switching between different hosts. It spends half its life cycle on sedges, unnoticed, before producing its minute clustercups, brimming with spores, on nettles in the summer months. The accolade for the most architecturally impressive fungus went to an immaculate group of oyster mushrooms, growing on fallen logs. In the silence of the beech wood there was a sense of awe when we peered under the tiered smooth grey brackets, with their radiating rows of gills, like the fan vaulting of a cathedral roof. But there was also a hint of menace: Pleurotus ostreatus is carnivorous. Tiny nematode worms, attracted to the perpetual moisture of wood softened by fungal rot, are paralysed by the toadstool's toxin, unable to escape its hyphae that invade and digest them. Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian's Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at and get a 15% discount

Is Your Tomato Garden Struggling? This Flower Might Be To Blame
Is Your Tomato Garden Struggling? This Flower Might Be To Blame

Yahoo

time12-07-2025

  • Health
  • Yahoo

Is Your Tomato Garden Struggling? This Flower Might Be To Blame

Growing the perfect garden is often a balancing act. Factors such as soil acidity, average temperature, and precipitation levels can greatly affect what is able to thrive in your yard. As if that weren't enough, you also need to watch for plant pairings that don't work well together. Some plants thrive in full sun, while others need shade. Some need a lot of water and specific soil nutrients, while others need less. If you're growing tomatoes, you need to be aware of what won't work alongside them. One particularly troublesome plant to include in your tomato garden is the sunflower. If your tomatoes are struggling and there are sunflowers nearby, that could be your reason. This is because sunflowers are allelopathic. Their roots release chemicals that inhibit the growth of nearby plants within about a three-foot area. Some plants are especially sensitive to these chemicals, tomatoes among them. In fact, tomatoes are best grown away from a number of other plants. From a survival standpoint, it makes sense for a sunflower to produce these chemicals. If a plant can suppress the growth of other plants nearby, it eliminates competition for resources. That means the sunflower gets more access to soil nutrients, sunlight, and water to sustain itself. It also means that the sunflower's seedlings will have an even easier time the following season. Read more: 12 Store-Bought Italian Salad Dressings, Ranked Worst To Best Even if sunflower roots weren't toxic to your tomatoes, they would still cause several other problems. One obvious issue is the towering height of sunflowers. Growing well over tomato plants, they can easily block the sun. Tomatoes kept in constant shade grow much less vigorously than those grown in full sun. Sunflowers also act as disease vectors for tomato plants. A study from Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE) showed that tomatoes planted near sunflowers were susceptible to diseases such as tobacco mosaic virus and early blight. These infections result in lower tomato yields and plant loss. It's unclear whether the increased disease risk is due to the allelopathic roots of the sunflowers or other causes. Practically speaking, it doesn't matter why the tomatoes are more vulnerable to these infections. Your tomatoes are likely to suffer if grown with sunflowers either way. Because both sunflowers and tomatoes demand large amounts of light and nutrients, planting them together leads to direct competition for resources. Sunflowers also require several gallons of water during a watering, meaning they will suffer when the tomatoes absorb some of the water and soil nutrients -- in other words, neither plant will benefit from being near the other one. Since those toxins produced by sunflower roots already give sunflowers a competitive edge, tomatoes typically lose out. If they grow at all, the fruit will be small and have a much smaller yield. If you want to have both tomatoes and sunflowers in your garden, it's best to space them well apart so they can each thrive. Both the seeds and flowers of sunflowers are edible, so they are useful to keep in the garden. And if you're looking for a suitable companion for your vines, here's why you should plant basil with tomatoes. Read the original article on Tasting Table.

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