Mycologist Zach Hedstrom sprays a spore-infused liquid to inoculate debris from forest thinning.

Inside Boulder Mushroom’s laboratory, a refrigerator houses an array of agar plates containing diverse mycelium cultures.

We have paid attention to mycological wonders for long enough that surprises are rare; but they happen. Stephen Robert Miller’s reporting, with photography by Jimena Peck were published in the Washington Post and came to our attention by way of the Food & Environment Reporting Network, which is where you can read the entire article:

How mushrooms can prevent megafires

Thinning forests to prevent fires produces a lot of sticks and other debris, which also pose a fire risk. In Colorado and elsewhere, scientists are using fungi to turn those trimmings into soil.

Overgrown stands of lodgepole pine are a risk for megafires. Thinning the stands simulates the effects of a natural fire but also generates a large amount of biomass, called “slash,” which can also fuel forest fires.

If you’ve gone walking in the woods out West lately, you might have encountered a pile of sticks. Or perhaps hundreds of them, heaped as high as your head and strewn about the forest like Viking funeral pyres awaiting a flame.

These slash piles are an increasingly common sight in the American West, as land managers work to thin out unnaturally dense sections of forests — the result of a commitment to fire suppression that has inadvertently increased the risk of devastating megafires.

“We have an epidemic of trees in Colorado,” said Stefan Reinold, a forester with Boulder County’s Parks and Open Space department. In the Rocky Mountain forests that he manages, a century of stamping out wildfires as soon as they arose failed to account for the role fire plays in maintaining healthy forest ecosystems. Today, the resulting abundance of densely packed pines and firs fuels huge blazes.

In response, the federal government has committed nearly $5 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to thinning forests on about 50 million Western acres over the next 10 years. Although this can be accomplished with prescribed burns, the risk of controlled fires getting out of hand has foresters embracing another solution: selectively sawing trees, then stripping the limbs from their trunks and collecting the debris.

The challenge now is what to do with all those piles of sticks, which create fire hazards of their own. Some environmental scientists believe they have an answer: mushrooms. Fungus has an uncommon knack for transformation. Give it garbage, plastic, even corpses, and it will convert them all into something else — for instance, nutrient-rich soil.

Down where the Rocky Mountains meet the plains, in pockets of forest west of Denver, mycologists like Zach Hedstrom are harnessing this unique trait to transform fire fuel into a valuable asset for local agriculture.

For Hedstrom, the idea sprung from an experiment on a local organic vegetable farm. He and the farm owner had introduced a native oyster mushroom to wood chips from a tree that fell in a windstorm. “That experiment showed us that the native fungi were helping to accelerate the decomposition really substantially,” he said. Working with local governments, environmental coalitions, and farmers, he is now honing the method…

Read the whole story here.