Fungi and bacteria are binging on burned soil
news.ucr.edu
news.ucr.edu
"...black morels (Morchella elata and related species) are mostly found in coniferous forests, disturbed ground and recently burned areas."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morchella
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morchella#Association_with_wil...
There are also fire-dependent plants that are reproduction-adapted for these conditions.
"Some cones, such as those of lodgepole pine and sequoia, are pyriscent, as well as many chaparral shrubs, meaning they require heat from fire to open cones to disperse seeds."
[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259126195_Dark_eart...
There could be a a difference due to an intensely hot fire in an area where fires have been historically suppressed. There is a survey of pickers on whether hotter fires are more or less productive with 29% vs 54% [2] but I don't know the methadology.
[1] 'Approximately 250 000 ha of British Columbia forest lands were burnt (Filmon 2004). In the East Kootenay region alone, a total of 43 679 ha burned that year. Based on this figure, the apparent correlation of morel production with recent wildfire exposure, and the morel production levels observed in random experimental plots (7568 morels per hectare), Keefer (2005) estimated that 76 × 107 kg ascocarps grew in the region in 2003. Assuming the average weight of morels harvested in the region matches the 20 g per ascocarp observed by Pilz et al. (2004) in the United States, this would amount to 2.27 × 107 kg of morels produced in the region during the first flush of 2004. The size and scope of subsequent flushes is unknown but based on observations of two additional flushes in the burnt forest at Lamb Creek (Winder and Keefer 2008), the actual size of the potential morel crop could be tripled from the above estimate' https://cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/B08-045
[2] https://central.bac-lac.gc.ca/.item?id=mr05125&op=pdf&app=Li...
Either way, if hosts dying was all there was to it, you'd expect all sorts of myccorrhizal mushrooms to grow after a fire, and most don't.
Edit: that's right folks, keep those downvotes coming for suggesting actually conserving something instead of exploiting it.
I honestly don’t know if harvesting them change much. ( bare of methodically harvesting everything over a season )
A hundred years ago, there was enormous production of truffles (fungi with underground fruiting bodies) in Europe, but all of that production was lost when they fell out of favor. They are not the most nutritious use of the land, but lost none the less.
"In the wild, many trees depend on fire as a successful way to clear out the competition and release their seeds. In particular, the giant sequoia depends on fire to reproduce: the cones of the tree open after a fire releases their seeds, the fire having cleared all competing vegetation... Eucalyptus regnans or mountain ash of Australia also depends on fire but in a different fashion. They carry their seeds in capsules which can deposit at any time of the year. Being flammable, during a fire the capsules drop nearly all of their seeds and the fire consumes the eucalypt adults, but most of the seeds survive using the ash as a source of nutrients; at their rate of growth, they quickly dominate the land and a new eucalyptus forest grows."
That sounds kind of like the opposite of how you'd want to slowly end up domesticating a lifeform, doesn't it?
Digging them out and leaving the mycel exposed for examole, is bad. Cover them up again please.
And mushrooms need a lot of spores, because for a new mushroom, 2 spores have to come together by chance.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...
PNW Mushrooms FB group for more info. Here are all the rules on commercial, personal harvesting and maps: https://www.fs.usda.gov/detailfull/okawen/passes-permits/for...
Worth noting there's a ton of different mushrooms called morels (though they're all pretty much related and even "false morels" are usually choice edibles) and when talking about the kinds that grow after fires they're usually referred to as "burn morels"
Didn't find any, but maybe it was too fresh (fire was in January I think, I visited late in spring). Did take some pictures. It will be interesting to compare them to what it looks like today, I plan to go there again when morel season starts. Fire ecology is fascinating in its own right... but morels, man.
Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal. I don’t think it’s an accident that terra preta (a biochar + ? complex of soil) is found in Brazil.
It’s also a reason we have to be careful about global warming. Temperate forests make great carbon sinks, tropical do not. If we tip more land into tropical we lose a powerful method of remediation.
You're not wrong about the diminished abilities of a desert to hold water. More people drown in deserts every year than die of thirst. When it does rain it pools up and can easily create flash floods. The major problem is if you do try to start building any topsoil, these types of floods can wash away your years of work. It's a hard problem because you're both in desperate need of precipitation and desperate fear of it
Techniques that could be used to combat this are things like the waffle gardens[0] that Zuni people have used for a long time, olla pot irrigation that have been in use in China and Northern Africa for over 4,000 years, and complex swale systems, or terracing systems like the Incans used to basically turn deserts into fertile ground[2] and might be the reason we today have potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, peanuts, sweet potatoes and a large number of other crops domesticated in the Andes
I really think the biggest challenge is just shade though. The worst thing you could possibly do for soil is expose it to direct sunlight. One "geoengineer-y" idea I toy with that keeps coming up for me is what if we just built a bunch of large boxes made of wood or bamboo some other biodegradable material and just left them in the desert. All that you really need is something like the structures that shade covered parking lots. If you just make some large, flat, cheap structures like these you'd be able to provide what's possibly one of the most valuable resources in the desert: shade. Ultimately if you manage to start a soil ecology up, the whole issue solves itself. Soils inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi hold 50x as much water as those that don't; the soil activity of bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, etc also turn the large grained sandy soils into more loam-y soils that can support many more life forms and plants; the fine roots of plants that tend to grow in soils like these hold together soil better so less topsoil gets lost; plants that grow with mycorrhizal fungi are less susceptible to drought (as well as frost and basically every other stressors you can think of) and have much more access to nutrients.
Basically all our problems go away if we can just get soil going. And plenty of desert plants already know this. Creosote bushes, nara melons, and the nitre bush are 3 examples that immediately come to mind. All of these slow growing plants have the strategy of simply providing shade and holding as much soil together as they can. And over time an incredible diversity of soil microbiomes form around the roots of these plants. The nitre bush also forms nabkhas[3] that capture other debris flying around and over time lessons the harshness of the desert winds, thereby lessening the rate of topsoil loss.
Nature already has solutions. If we could just kickstart the process by providing the right microclimates we might be able to help these organisms stand a chance against the forces of desertification
[0] https://www.notechmagazine.com/2021/11/waffle-gardens.html
[1] https://www.nativeseeds.org/blogs/blog-news/how-to-use-olla-...
There are ways to do this without creating bogs, and work off of the monsoon rains that come through these regions.
If wasteland can accumulate organic material, and start rebuilding the soil, it starts retaining more water, which brings in more vegetation. This reverses desertification. There are some good examples of this in India. There are parts of the Arizona central canal which accidentally created bearms that also started this effect.
My favorite way of developing fungal-dominated soil is starting with a basin (for retaining water; I'm in AZ), and filling it with wood chips from chipdrop. The trees I do this with all love it.
I know someone who started sourcing the waste product of mushroom cultivation. These are wood chips that have been "spent", (harvested the fruiting body) but would still have the mycelium to jumpstart this process.
For growing annuals though, I think biochar is still a great option. Another possibility is, rather than looking at temperature, look at rainfall. Tropical forests gets a huge amount of rain, washing away nutrients. Biochar helps retain that. It might be that temperate rainforests would benefit more from biochar than building up fungal soil.
This seems like an impossible claim to back up but I would absolutely love to read if you have anything that would
It's well-known that in general in the ecological succession of the soil food web, soils "start" out more bacteria dominated (corresponding with nitrogen generally being available more as nitrates and nitrites) and slowly turn to being more fungal dominated (corresponding with nitrogen being generally available more as ammonium or other harder to access forms that generally come along as the food web gets increasingly complex and trophic layers build up)
By "start" up above I of course mean after a disturbance like a fire since we're talking about secondary succession (if we were talking about primary succession we'd be talking volcanoes and lichen turning rocks to soil). Therefore, I would expect the pattern to have a lot more to do with the amount of disturbance different areas are exposed to. Perhaps a lot of tropical areas can have intense monsoon seasons, but there are just as many examples I can think of of temperate areas with regular disturbances.
In addition, I tend to think of the incredible diversity of orchid species in the tropics and many of these species often rely on a specific fungal species to even germinate. So I would also expect to see more diversity both in fungi and bacteria in the tropics
Is any of my line of thinking on this misled? Would love to have it pointed out!
I urge you to read about indigenous wildland fire management techniques. Also check out the 'forest fire' cellular automata model. You speak of niches as being exclusive, but ecosystems are composed of bubbling foams of overlapping, interacting niches, which merge, split, re-combine, etc. as the ecosystem progresses through modes of dynamic equilibrium. Any wildland will have fires; a mechanism for integrating those fires into the ecosystem's dynamics is inevitable, because nature operates as a ruthlessly exploitative force when a new element is introduced to an ecosystem. Thus, a niche is identified, and organisms fill it. TFA reports only on the inevitable conclusion of the natural course of things.
> just don’t see this as some kind of panacea
Why do you think the author is arguing that it is?
A correct statement, the intensity would be lower and the frequency higher without human intervention.
"Slash and burn" as I've heard it is mostly applied to colonial techniques where the goal is actual destruction of forests to turn the land into (temporarily) very productive agricultural plots. This is in contrast to the cultural burns that were usually done in the name of preservation and to the benefit of many native wild plants
But we could just be going by different dictionaries