Words: Natalia Nowak (she/her)
Treating our ecosystems as an interwoven, living, communicating organism – as with the mycorrhizae – has been shown to boost ecosystem diversity and health a hundredfold better than when we focus on a single species.
When we think of woodlands in Scotland, our eyes and minds tend to look up – look up at crowns of far-spreading and smothering branches, shading the undergrowth into a sun-dappled landscape, roots tethered to our crawling Earth. But dig into the soil a little, not even a hundred centimetres, and you will find a network that puts our satellites and landlines to shame. Made up of mycelia – fungi, for the layman – this network weaves together every individual plant in the forest into a breathing tapestry of resilience, lovingly (or jealously) named the “wood wide web”.
Across the world, more than 80% of all terrestrial plants have roots that form chimeric organs with soil fungi, called mycorrhizae. Plants generally tend to favour kin – keep it in the family. However, the mycorrhizal network creates pathways between unrelated plants, as long as the plant is providing carbon. The network, in turn, becomes a connecting force for transferring water, nutrients, and even signals across the forest, allowing help to be communicated between different species of plants. It is a translator, much like our own internet, which acts as a congregation of all of humanity’s cultures and languages – a throwback to the “wood wide web” concept. Mycorrhizae dominate the soil of many ecosystems, including our Scottish woodlands, and by doing so, create a network that pumps nutrients from soil to higher plants such as trees. This includes the movement of carbon, which promotes the regeneration of forests. When it comes to mitigating the effects of climate change, it highlights how all-encompassing our reforestation effort needs to be to ensure effective conservation.
It is this web that Rhizocore Technologies, alongside the Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), is trying to replicate, in a bid to restore Scotland’s natural woodland to even a fraction of its previous strength.
What Rhizocore Technologies is aiming to do by regrowing this mycelium network is to simulate the natural conditions young trees find themselves in when they begin their life as saplings. In previous years of conservation and reforestation, saplings were simply planted wherever, whenever. There was little consideration of how trees naturally establish themselves. Trees grow up, and they grow anywhere with soil, right? However trees need symbionts, and planting sites we have been using for decades – such as unused agricultural areas where trees haven’t grown for centuries – are missing those populations of fungi. These associations between mycorrhizal fungi and plant roots have been co-evolving for over 400 million years. Our clearing of native Scottish woodlands in the span of maybe 150 years has done very little to back track that. So, there is a “mushroom-shaped vacuum” at the heart of our reforestation issue. There is a need to establish native, local mycorrhizal fungi alongside our planting operations – and Rhizocore’s fungi pellets seem to be doing the trick.
The initial trials, done in Damside, North Lanarkshire, found that trees treated with RhizoPellet had a 97% survival rate, in comparison with the 78% survival of untreated trees 12 months after planting. The saplings treated with the pellets were also more resistant to the insect pest pine weevil, which staves sapling growth. This is important not only for the survival of the tree, but for the minimisation of human intervention, as it means chemical control for the pest is unnecessary, reducing runoff into the rest of the ecosystem. Rather impressive, despite just being a trial.
Every success, no matter how small, needs to be celebrated. Although we are at the beginning stages of this integration, the hope that stems from this work needs to be cradled and cherished. It is easy to become numb to the barrage of destruction we see happening to our environment. To be cliché, apathy kills. On a practical level, however, this has taught us much about how our conservation efforts need to work to continue making an impact. Treating our ecosystems as an interwoven, living, communicating organism – as with the mycorrhizae – has been shown to boost ecosystem diversity and health a hundredfold better than when we focus on a single species. Think of the metaphor of a “wood wide web”. It rests on the familiar ecological concept that life on Earth is enmeshed in a manner we can hardly imagine – a complexity so intense it makes your head spin. The success of these mycorrhizal pellets highlights the complicated yet honest value in treating the natural world as such.
