"Do very well" may not be quite correct. When mycorrhizal hosts die, the organism puts all its energy into escaping the dead end - fruiting and dispersing spores. If there are periodic fires that kill trees, that's a great time to spread to a neighboring area. If giant fire that takes out vast areas, that may be less good.
I'm not sure if that is quite accurate although it is plausible given the negative effect of hotter fires in traditionally fire controlled areas. I read into this a couple years ago and found published data on increased harvests of morels in terms of kg/hectare after large forest fires [example from looking again today 1]. I think as humans we are biased to think above the ground and think of destruction.
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
That's a good point. I'm not sure. Some areas I pick edible mushrooms other that morels have not recovered from logging or fires short or long term so my individual anecdotal experience is no. I couldn't find good data on chanterelles or boletus species.
But controlled burns and fires that otherwise do not cause complete incineration of the symbiotic trees/plants would not result in the death of the fungi. However, with the ground cleared, the spores would travel further.
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."
Most california sages also require the presence of ashes to germinate. It's quite common amongst flora in the California chaparral. In large part due to thousands of years of ecosystem management with controlled burns by native Californians. In a lot of ways California is a manufactured landscape (though even Amazonia has been labelled as manufactured[0] so it's not all that surprising)
I don't think morels are entirely reliant on myccorrhizal relationships. There have apparently been successful small scale farming attempts without trees, check out the Danish Morel Project.
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.
I've definitely seen morels go crazy after their host tree dies - whether by fire or a saw. I also agree that they can likely be partially saprobes, so maybe this adaptation is related more to the latter than the former. I was just pointing out that I think it's far from settled that "fire is good for morels" is true in general, especially for mega fires.
I live on the west coast of north america - the last few years following wildfires my mum heads up to the scorched mountaintops to pick morels and sells them. Big hauls, hundreds of dollars' worth of rare mushrooms growing in ruined forests.
I knew a lady who, her and her two kids, make $1500 in a weekend. Oregon Coast range, don't remember what types. It's important to remember with all mushrooms there are only a few good days a year.
They aren't really 'rare' they just can't be cultivated in captivity at a commercial scale well due to their need for a symbiotic relationship with trees as well as Morels being very picky about their fruiting triggers. I have seen people successfully 'seed' an area by making a slurry by blending molasses, water, and wild foraged morels that were subpar and letting the spores germinate with a water aerator running in the bucket and dumping the slurry in areas on their property that were favorable to Morels.
We should put more effort into learning how to farm them, as they are so highly prized.
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.
Some do, naturally. Otherwise, there wouldn't be so many adaptations to exploit it, thus the subject of the parent post and its linked article.
"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."
I visited a burned forest last spring, hoping to catch this phenomenon. I had been scouring the newspapers for news about small forest fires; since I live in one of the soggiest places on earth outside the tropics it doesn't happen a lot.
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.
Yes morel hunting is a different type of mushroom hunting than typical. In places that aren't as cold it's even a totally different season. I wouldn't be surprised if the biggest buyers of burn maps are actually morel hunters
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"
Biochar turns out to be more effective in bacteria dominant soils than in fungal, where the fungi provide some of the same services.
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.
Fun fact to add about carbon sinks, peat bogs can sink 4-17 times as much CO2 per acre as a forest and acts as an incredible moisture regulator. One of my more out there dreams is to start a big man made peat bog at the edge of a desert.
I'd have to find somewhere with water near a desert, that's why I specified the edge. My understanding of how some deserts form is that farming techniques or other forces can cause a region to stop retaining water as well, and if this happens in a large enough area, it can lead to less rainfall etc. I remember reading about how herd animals trampling prairie grass and shitting all over it causes it to retain significantly more moisture during dryer times. My thought is that moisture regulating bogs could possibly at least stop deserts from expanding
Seems like we should be testing geoengineering in deserts first before we try it in much harsher environments like Mars. I think desalinated ocean water via low tech solar might be a good way to start - https://inhabitat.com/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2016/08/F...
My understanding is that desalinization should be a method of last resort, since it produces a lot of brine that is hard to deal with at scale in a way that isnt bad for the marine life. Depending on the desert, dew collectors might work, although I havent looked into how much water sphagnum moss needs over a year, now much a dew collector can produce, how much evaporation would happen, etc.
Most deserts are actually formed primarily due to abiotic features like geography. Usually if you see a desert, there's a nearby mountain range that that desert is in the shadow of, preventing it from getting much precipitation
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
God damn, thanks for all the info. My original intent wasn't actually even fighting desertification, but rather carbon capture, I kinda saw it as a two birds one stone kinda thing. But this gives me a lot of ideas for a multistep process. It seems like jumping right to peat isnt feasible, but maybe some microclimate engineering could be a first step in anticipation of the bogs.
Defining characteristic of arid is little precipitation. Desert is more about sandy soil that supports sparse vegetation.
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.
> Tropical forests are bacterial, temperate fungal
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!
Where can I learn more about what you've said, if you have sources to hand, please? I'm a big fan of bio-char (lol), so hearing that it's not-so good in temperate zones is disappointing to me, but interesting. Thanks :)
I don't know what the commentor meant, but I'm reading more as, there are other options in temperate zone perennials that are as effective as biochar.
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.
I guess that makes sense. Compared to seeds, fungi spores are ephemeral and they make better use of available biomass. Ash also tends to retain its dampness pretty well.
In response to the subtitle asking whether these species can help revive burnt areas: I doubt it. It is true that some species are specially adapted and even need burnt vegetation to thrive (eg. There’s a bird species I believe endogenous to the Yosemite area whose name I can’t recall). However, these species occupy a particular niche much like I expect fungi or bacteria do. For them to restore an ecosystem naturally implies balance. There is nothing balanced about the intensity and frequency of fires, which are in large part anthropogenic. Maybe there are some species that are adaptable but I just don’t see this as some kind of panacea.
> There is nothing balanced about the intensity and frequency of fires
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?
Depends who/where/when you're talking about. For example, I'd really hesitate to lump the carefully planned controlled "slow burns" that Native Californians and Aboriginal Australians have practiced into the same category as "slash and burn". The former is done in a very planned way in very restricted areas and ends up having the net effect of reducing the number of wildfires while also increasing the productivity of certain species like acorns. There's a large number of other benefits to these techniques like the charcoal produced ending up cleaning the streams and making them more safe to enjoy and drink from for humans
"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
That's certainly my understanding. I seem to remember from an Intro to Hinduism class that when the "Aryans" arrived in the Indus Valley, the first thing they did was burn down a bunch of the forests, because the charred mulch made the soil more fertile for growing crops.
"...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...