Mushrooms slow down the warming of the climate

The war with warmer weather has an ally that nobody expected. It is the fungus that grows in dry spruce forests in Alaska, Canada, Scandinavia and other northern regions.

As the soil in these forests warms, fungi grow on plant matter to dry out and produce significantly less carbon dioxide than mushrooms in moister, cooler areas. This is a surprise for scientists who think that warmer soil will release larger amounts of carbon dioxide because the cold climate slows the process of fungi converting soil carbon into carbon dioxide.

Understanding the carbon cycle in the forest is essential in order to accurately predict the warming of the global climate, and thereby lead to policies to curb greenhouse gas release. This is even more important for the northern forest area. which contains about 30% of Earth's soil carbon, equivalent to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere.

Steven Allision, a professor of evolutionary ecology and biology and author of the study, said: 'We have not found an extremely warm cycle of climate in dry forests. northern. Instead we get the opposite; In fact, the climate warms up to prevent further warming. Earth's natural process gives us more time to implement the policies needed to combat global warming. '

Northern soils contain large amounts of carbon from dead grass, trees and shrubs. Like humans, fungi and bacteria in the soil use plant carbon as a source of food and convert carbon into carbon dioxide.

Allision and her colleague Kathleen Trêseder have conducted research to find out what happens to carbon dioxide levels when the North forest does not have permafrost. About a third of the northern forests in the world do not have permafrost, mostly in Alaska, Canada, Western Siberia and Northern Europe.

Picture 1 of Mushrooms slow down the warming of the climate

The war with a warmer climate has an unexpected ally, mushroom (Photo: University of California - Irvine)

Global warming is expected to affect the heaviest northern region, causing temperatures to rise from 5 to 7 degrees Celsius until 2100.

Scientists perform experiments in a spruce forest near Fairbanks, Alaska. They set up small greenhouses and choose similar non-heated plots (control group), both of which are provided with the same amount of water.

In mid-May, when the growing season begins, the air and soil temperatures in the greenhouse and the control group. When the greenhouse is closed, the air temperature increases by about 5 degrees Celsius, and the soil temperature increases by about 1 degree.

After experimenting with the control group and the greenhouse, scientists discovered that by the end of the growing season in mid-August, soil in the greenhouse produced less carbon dioxide than the soil in the control group.

A soil analysis shows that only about half of the fungi work in greenhouse samples compared to soil samples from the control group. When the fungus dries, they either die or stop working, and stop producing carbon dioxide, scientists say.

Treseder, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, said: 'It is fortuitous that mushrooms are badly affected by the warming climate. This could help reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we are directly releasing into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. '

The study is published in the journal Global Change Biology November 3.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Energy, and the NOAA post-doctoral climate change scholarship fund.

Update 16 December 2018