Scientists to map fungal networks, determine climate role

The Associated Press ^ | November 30, 2021 | By FRANK JORDANS

[Oldeconomybuyer]

BERLIN (AP) — 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 said they 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 — including global warming.

“Fungi are invisible ecosystem engineers, and their loss has gone largely unnoticed by the public,” said Toby Kiers, a professor of evolutionary biology at Amsterdam’s Free University and co-founder of the non-profit Society for the Protection of Underground Networks that’s spearheading the effort.

“New research and climate models are providing irrefutable evidence that the Earth’s survival is linked to the underground,” she said.

Experts agree that tracking how fungal networks, also known as mycelia, are affected by climate change is important for protecting them — and ensure they can contribute to nature’s own mechanisms for removing carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, from the air.

Fungi can do this by providing nutrients that allow plants to grow faster, for example, or by storing carbon in the trillions of miles of root-like mass they themselves weave underground.

[Monkey Face]

Waiting on Darks to move us and the owner of the thread for permission to um...appropriate it.

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