Magic mushrooms: how scientists have discovered that mushrooms are the secret ingredient to restore world forests | Mushrooms

EComing in the middle of the summer, the former Hazelwoods on the Hebridous Island of Seil are cool and silent. Countless tilted stems of hazelnut support a thick canopy, which drives the sun and hides everything below in a sort of “fairy darkness”, explains Bethan Manley, Wellcoma Biologist Sanger Institute.

The branches of foam and lichen threaded honeysuckle, forming a large dome above you, adds David Satori, researcher to Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

This rich forest, on the Hebridean Islands of Scotland, is one of the oldest British wooded environments. At the end of the last glacial era, the kilometer thickness glacier that had buried northern Europe had melted and the hazelnuts germinated through the rock left behind.

Scientists can go out to date when these forests have crossed the west coast of Great Britain and Ireland, explains Satori, because “about 10,000 years ago, you have a massive peak in hazel pollen”. Scottish lichenologists have estimated that these special forests may have existed since 7,500 billion billion.

“It’s older than any pine forest [in the UK]. Ancient than any old Oakwood that we have in the south, “says Satori.” One of the oldest woods in the British islands. “”

Today, there are only a few tiny plots of ancient growth. Satori and Manley came to this 49 hectare wooded reserve (121 acres), the Ballachuan Hazelwood, to find the best example of the country.

From the outside, the bush -shaped stand seems so commonplace that you could pass in front and miss it.

Their target in the forest is even less visible, lit by the dead branches which strangely hang the trees and what Sator describes as “structures in the shape of a truncated orange finger that grasp the hazelnut branches”.

These ancient woods house special mushrooms, including the mushroom of glue crust This sticks the hazelnut branches and the parasitic hazelnut gloves that result from it.

Here, researchers aim to understand how fungal communities could be essential to repel the lost British hazelwoods, part of a global mission to map the forgotten underground half of the forests of our planet.

In recent years, Great Britain has temporarily started to adopt its status as tropical forest nation. Its woods, which spend a large part of the year covered with mist or rain, are a distinct shape of temperate tropical forest, which survives only in the west of Scotland. After the success of Guy Shrubsole successful of the lost tropical forests of Great Britain, the British government has announced its intention to restore the tropical forests of the country, which have decreased to less than 1% of land in Great Britain.

New research by the University of Leeds show that the United Kingdom could play a role worldwide in the inversion of the decline of these tropical forests. Temperal tropical forests are a rare ecosystem which covers less than 1% of the land of the earth, limited to fresh and humid conditions easily affected by climate change.

According to this research, around the planet, about two -thirds of temperate tropical forests could be lost as weather conditions move – with certain nations, such as Austria, the loss of 90%. But the United Kingdom and Ireland have large expansion of impresh and rainy lands, which means that these two countries have the opportunity to become “world leaders in the restoration and reforestation of the temperate tropical forest”, write the authors.

The ability of forests to resume, however, depends strongly on the communities of mycorrhizal fungi which grow symbiotically with roots, allowing fungi and trees to exchange nutrients. Although mycorrhizal mushrooms have experienced huge drops across Europe, being planted in an indigenous soil microbiome with healthy fungi can stimulate the growth of trees and other 64%plants, research has shown.

The first problem for Hazelwood tropical forests, as well as many rare forests across the planet, is that no one knows what this underground ecology implies, explains Satori. “Almost nothing has been done to understand these communities,” he said. About three quarters of mushrooms are “dark taxa” – the species known only by their DNA sequence, as physical specimens have not been found.

Over the next two years, Sotori will document the ground mushrooms in Ballachuan and more than 20 other sites to establish the very first map of the Mycorrhiziennes communities through the temperate tropical forest areas of Great Britain.

Today, it leads a metal carroting device in the ground around the Hazel roots. It removes the spikes from the roots, to see what is associated with Hazel, while sampling the environmental DNA of the soil. This “Edna” can give a wide image of the range of mushrooms that are there, which play different roles in the ecosystem.

Satori’s work is supported by the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), a research organization founded in 2021 to analyze the mycorrhizian fungal communities and defend their protection.

The Seil sampling work links the Chills Forests of Scotland to tropical forests in danger, but very different, in Colombia and the island of Palmyra, the atoll most distant from the earth. On each of the research sites, the underground microbiome – which the organization calls the “planet’s circulatory system” – is surveyed to produce a global card, which has recently been published in the journal Nature.

In the richly biodiversity river of the Magdalena river in Colombia, they test tropical forest areas released from livestock farming, to see if these fields still have similar fungal microbiomas such as areas of primary tropical forest intact or overturned in new states.

In the areas now abandoned by farmers, SPUN monitors to see if the places rich in forest mushrooms repel naturally – and produce a map of the locations rich in mushrooms which can be the best for replanting.

The challenge in the United Kingdom is more extreme in some respects than Colombia, explains Manley. While a large part of Colombian agricultural land has been released in recent decades, “in certain regions of Scotland, you have not had forests for perhaps 1000 years,” she said, potentially leaving trees with little fungal life to support them, making them more vulnerable to drought and other stresses.

Through the British islands, a number of efforts to restore tropical forests are now underway. In Bowden Pillars, a 30 -hectare site of “Creation of tropical forest” in Totnes, the Devon Wildlife Trust (DWT) ordered the analysis of the soil to help understand the impact of the historic use of the site in the field, explains Claire Inglis, Nature Reserve Officer at DWT.

Although volunteers have already planted more than 2,500 trees, the project aims first and foremost to conceive of means that seeds and mushrooms can propagate naturally, because “natural colonization is always your most resilient option for future woods”, explains Inglis, adding that they were still starting to understand how to restore fungal communities.

More practical measures have been taken into account by the DWT and the National Trust, which restores the tropical forest in northern Devon. These include the restoration of the floors by “inoculation”, either by adding earth balls from intact ecosystems when the trees are planted or by transplanting the fungal spores.

Felicity Roos, National Trust floor consultant, says: “In the right circumstances, the restoration of landscapes and degraded soils, inoculants can play an important role in catering.” Commercial bi-fertilers who claim to contain Mycorrhizal spores are now a business of billions, but scientific studies have shown that the majority of products contain dead or ineffective spores, some also containing pathogens or microorganisms causing the disease.

These restoration projects highlight the importance of preserving remains such as Ballachuan and other reserves or fragments of tropical forest in the world. These old plots act as “refuges”: mushroom reservoirs which can then act as a source to spread through the patchwork of different types of habitats – agricultural land, developed land, semi -natural wild lands – which surround it.

A large part of the temperate tropical forest of the United Kingdom is fragmented in these small pieces on land belonging to different farmers and properties. Satori claims that restoration will require reconnecting them throughout the landscape in order to have bridges that allow not only mushrooms, but also animals and insects to travel across the country. “Having these interconnected landscapes will certainly be the best way to move forward,” he says. “It’s a long -term vision.”