Thinning forests to prevent mega-wildfires creates lots of piles of highly flammable sticks, and scientists say they have found a way to turn these potential bonfires into nutrient rich soil.
Forest manager Jeff Ravage with the Coalition for the Upper South Platte says if done properly, mushrooms can eliminate wood piles safely through fungal decay, a process he calls “cold fire.”
"So it's really doing the same thing as fire, and it doesn’t release heat so it doesn’t cause runaway catastrophic fires," he said. "And we’re now finding evidence that it could be useful in sequestering carbon back into the soil."
Creating the right conditions, and adding mushroom spores onto wood piles, paves the way for mycelium - the often unseen, root-like structure of the fungi - to turn the wood into a compost rich in carbon and other nutrients.
About a third of current thinning costs go to hauling out or burning the slash, and Ravage says cold fire can dramatically reduce those costs.
Vast landscapes of forests across the U.S. have grown thicker after decades of fire suppression strategies. To meet the demands of forest-fire mitigation, Ravage says efforts are underway to make it possible to scale up cold-fire production to 12 tons every week.
"Because that’s what needs to be done," he said. "We have approximately six million acres of forest that really needs mitigation in Colorado, if we want to preserve the forest."
Ravage believes mushrooms can also play a role in mitigating the loss of productive agricultural lands. He says the compost created in forests could help restore farmland soil that has essentially been degraded to material that can support standing plants.
"Because of our use of petroleum fertilizer and all the insecticides and pesticides we’ve put on, we’ve basically killed the soil," he said. "This mushroom compost can add back the carbon and it can add back the nutrients. And most importantly our compost is alive, it contains all the microbiome."
This story was obtained through the Associated Press and produced by Public News Service.