SPUN’s governing board also includes former Patagonia CEO Rose Marcario and former Nature Conservancy CEO Mark Tercek.Ĭonfocal 3D-image of a fungal network with reproductive spores containing nuceli (smaller dots).
Advisors to this work include conservationist Jane Goodall Merlin Sheldrake, biologist and author of the book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures and founder of the Fungi Foundation, Giuliana Furci. That effort will be funded by a $3.5 million donation from the Jeremy and Hannelore Grantham Environmental Trust. Purple contrast video of nutrient flow inside mycelium. “The basis of the whole program is to use these DNA samples to start building these high resolution maps,” Kiers says. Working with local communities around the world, SPUN will launch an “underground explorers” program to train people to go out, examine the soil, and collect fungal samples, which will then be sent for DNA sequencing. SPUN will do so by using machine learning to predict where high levels of biodiversity are, and by collecting 10,000 samples across ecosystems on all continents. The first step in protecting these networks is to map them. Red contrast video of nutrient flow inside mycelium. There are an estimated trillions of kilometers of fungal mycelium around the world, but it’s increasingly threatened by agricultural expansion, chemicals and fertilizers, deforestation, pollution, and urbanization. “They’re kind of like the coral reefs of the soil.” These massive networks-which can make up to 50% of the living biomass of soil-are important for drawing down carbon into soil, moving around nutrients, and supporting biodiversity above ground.
It’s a global system that we can’t see,” she says. “They’ve evolved these strategies over 475 million years, and it’s become a global system. Kiers, a professor at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has been researching the “architecture” of these fungal networks to better understand how they trade resources with plants-exchanging nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus for carbon-and how their behavior might change under different conditions, like if the global temperature increases.īlue contrast video mycelium network.
Toby Kiers and Colin Averill “We work on the tenet that these fungal networks really underpin life on Earth, but we’re destroying them at such an alarming rate,” says Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and cofounder of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), the nonprofit announcing this mapping effort.