By BLANCHE HARDY
The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) have produced an application for viewing Earth’s underground fungal networks and Florida is a fungus mecca.
SPUN is a scientific research organization dedicated to mapping and protecting Earth’s underground fungal networks. SPUN scientists research and publish data intended to inform real world decisions considering the fungal network when planning to protect biodiversity, restore ecosystems and track carbon below ground.
Two recent publications highlight a significant volume of data and discovery details. SPUN data is featured in Global density and biomass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks published in Science under SPUN lead Justin D. Stewart and Global extinction risk assessment of soil-dependent species: recent progress and recommendations in Cambridge University Press.
The bulk of Earth’s biodiversity lives underground. The Global Density study reviewed the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (ICUN) Red List and found only a small fraction of soil organisms have ever been assessed for extinction risk. Among the 8,653 soil-dependent species currently listed, scientists found many are threatened or too poorly studied to evaluate properly for extinction risk. SPUN calls for urgent global efforts to map, monitor and conserve soil biodiversity before invisible extinctions occur.
Beyond biodiversity, most life on Earth lives in the soil. Species include fungi, insects, mites, worms and countless microscopic organisms integral to ecosystem function. SPUN describes the associated arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi network as the sub surface’s ecosystem engineers.
The AM fungi network creates a trading relationship with over 70 percent of plant species building hyphae, networks of tubular cells, that extend the area of root systems up to one hundred-fold. SPUN characterized these collective networks as Earth’s circulatory system. These underground communities regulate nutrients, store carbon, support plant growth and keep soil healthy by exchanging nutrients for host-derived carbon.
The network provides plants with up to 80 percent of their phosphorus and 20 percent of their nitrogen in exchange for their carbon. The denser the network, the better the opportunity for carbon to flow. Because the networks are subterranean and microscopic, they have been invisible to observation tools. A global team of researchers, including SPUN, set out to change that.
The scientists assembled data from 322 studies representing more than 16,000 soil cores across nine biomes and developed machine-learning models to predict hyphal densities globally. They combined field measurements with global data on climate, soil chemistry and vegetation then calibrated a biomass model from spatial predictions using Dutch Research Council member AMOLF’s robotic imaging of more than 300,000 hyphae.
SPUN estimates that global topsoil contains the equivalent living hyphae of 1 billion times the distance from Earth to the Sun. This volume equals 3 billion tons of biomass, roughly five times the weight of all humans.
Florida is underlain by a distinct and prevalent fungal network. The global map is available at: Underground Atlas: Mycorrhizal Biodiversity Map v1.0
