About This Project

Our previous study on the decay of forest waste products found that the compost produced by wild fungi holds up to twice as much carbon as natural montane soils (duff, produced by natural organic decay).

"The carbon sequestration potential of fungally produced composts" will investigate the carbon contents of post decay composts produced by white and brown rot fungus both in situ and in the lab. These techniques could aid in the natural sequestration of carbon in soils.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

The ever growing climate crisis is a unique problem for the human race. We can easily understand the excess CO2 we are injecting into the atmosphere. And therefore we can agree that reducing emissions can fix that problem. The excess CO2 already in the atmosphere is a trickier problem. Short of relying on natural systems, and their normal schedules, we don't have a lot of novel methods of sequestering carbon- removing and isolating it. The methods of fungal decay of waste woody materials we have been studying might be such a path by stabilizing the wood's carbon. And our ability to quantify and therefore target sequestration is one of the answers we are seeking. The fact that this method doesn't require high technology, just the ecology of nature itself, is an added benefit.

What is the significance of this project?

When we began researching the use of native wood rotting mushrooms to rapidly decay the waste products of forest restoration we noticed our mushroom compost was almost twice as rich in carbon as the natural forest duff.
This led us to wonder if there could be a way to increase the carbon density of our recycled soils by using specific fungi. Fungi called brown rotters leave a post decay product high in lignin. White rotters leave a compost high in cellulose. We want to quantify the amounts of carbon sequestration in both scenarios, as well as identify the specific type (and stability) of that carbon.
Soils in Boreal forests can contain up to 85% of the captured carbon of the entire forest system. In Montane forests that amount is closer to 25%.

What are the goals of the project?

We will get a baseline of the carbon sequestration potentials of the composts of different mushrooms. Using our rapid decay methods we will run multiple volumes of wood based substrate with 8 selected mushroom strains. Four white rotters and 4 brown rotters. We will use DNA barcoding techniques to verify the species and identify their type of rot throughout the experiment. In the end we will measure total organic carbon as well as the fractions of cellulosic and lignitic carbon to determine the stability of the compost. We want to increase the carbon holding capacity of our soils, keeping it out of the atmosphere and slowly halting the growing dangers of more warming. We want to absorb CO2 into our trees and soils, safe stores of carbon.