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An Environmental Triumph 400 Million Years in the Making
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Reasons to be Cheerful
Posted: October 25th, 2025
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/environmental-triumph-fung...
Each planting season, Claudia Bashian-Victoroff ventures out into Bole Woods. Laced throughout, weaving an intricate, microscopic web, are the mycorrhizal fungi she’s after — fungi that have spent 400 million years learning to live in symbiosis with plants, including the trees throughout Bole Woods and at least 80 percent of all species on the planet. Bashian-Victoroff doesn’t need much soil. A single spoonful can contain miles of fungal hyphae and filaments, engaged in an ancient evolutionary exchange with the trees to which they’ve bonded. The fungi gather up water and nutrients, and deliver them to the trees. In return, they receive carbohydrates developed through photosynthesis, which they fix into the soil as they grow. It’s a prosperous cycle, and Bashian-Victoroff is among a growing global community of researchers and conservationists taking advantage of this relationship to restore forests and other degraded ecosystems. Their goal: Promote the health of the soil beneath our feet and the plants it supports, sequester carbon and make agriculture more sustainable. Mycorrhizal fungi can be an important part of a broader suite of climate solutions, says Anne Polyakov, a fungal conservation and restoration scientist with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, which recently used machine learning to map the planet’s mycorrhizal networks in an effort to promote conservation.
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