Redwood Reader

162. Fungi
The role of fungi in forests has a long history of study. Fungi are essential for many of the processes involved in forests. The fruiting sporocarps of epigeous types, or those fruiting above the ground, is a better known aspect of fungi. This is what mushroom pickers seek. Some native types favored by hunters include chanyerelles, matasuke, or tanoak mushroom, morels, the boletes and black trumpets. Buyers pay a good price for these of several dollars a pound. Picking is by permit on most federal land managed by BLM and the Forest Service. Most recent management plans acknowledge epigeous mushroom pickers with a permit and season process. Buyers often set up along local roads or in motels, and you can learn a lot talking to them. One fer instance would be learning that there are many useable mushrooms with less culinary value that still bring some pay, like straw mushrooms.
Then there is aspect, association, temperature and time of year discussion. The majority of symbiotic forest fungi are ectomycorrhizia infecting root tissue between the cells. Fruiting occurs after the fall rains adnwhen temperature falls to a certain point in this region. The plant associations are relevant as the host trees can indicate a likely area to search. They produce hyphae and spores while seeking out nutrients in the environment. The short lived hyphae die back in several weeks leaving behind the structural component glomalin. Glomalin is essential to the forest community as tilth producing water retaining aggregator of soils, remaining there for decades. It changes from a structural component of the fungi to a part of the infrastructure of the forest as a whole.
Very little information is available about hypogeous fungi, or those that fruit belowground. Yet some of our most valuable species, such as truffles, are found there. Truffles are an essential part of the forest food web, providing 30-95% of small mammals food depending on time of year, in turn prey for old growth dependant predators, many of which are struggling with habitat loss- northern spotted owl, goshawk, marten, fisher. Truffle inoculation studies have been going on in Oregon for decades but they do not fruit every year, and cultivation has proved difficult, impossible in the lab without host trees.
Truffles indicate healthy subsoil communities, as they disappear after clear cuts as they are deprived of their nutrition source. Truffles are usually found in middle aged forests 30 to 200 years old. Mycology clubs often hold truffle hunts. They reappear after recovery has reached a certain point some time near canopy closure. They actually are part of a progression of types that assist the landscape and vegetation to recover from damage. Morels appear after ground disturbance damages mycelium or after hoist trees die.
Rhizopogons and generalists help seedlings survive hot dry summers. In clear cuts the number of seedlings can be amazing. When we think about the forest rebuilding its water system, we are less surprised. In that first year each seedling is conditioning a tiny circle of soil a couple of inches deep to hold water next wet season. All of them are hosting fungi that are producing glomalin. Any individual tree may be hosting dozens of species, all with slightly different characteristics but all contributing to the system as a whole.
Other fungi have different roles. Especially important are decomposers, again of an amazing variety. Here we find variety important because most fungi create one enzyme, which decomposes one component of plant litter into nutrition. Other species use other parts or other products created in the chain of digestion as fungi make new compounds available after obtaining their requirements.
Some straddle the fence, like armillaria, a decomposer of white oak and symbiotic.to Douglas fir. Natives valuing the white oak burnt the ground beneath them for several reasons, but primarily it was essential to prevent Douglas fir encroachment of managed Oregon white oak stands of improved acorns, an invaluable food source. The crowding of seedlings encourages some to die off, and needle drop begins almost right away. These create important opportunities for armillaria to colonize new space, and if there is a lot of downed wood and leaf litter the fungi will be drawn to the oaks. The highly active hyphae will begin attacking the oak, causing rot and eventual death even as the Douglas fir grows taller and shades the oak out, helping to hasten the process. Valuable groves were protected by regular burns, which also controlled certain insect pests and provided forest edge raw materials for native culture.
Reading the evidence for truffles it is not surprising that leave trees are recommended in all cutting blocks, allowing some subsoil processes to continue. Even so, we can expect diminished food supply to impact first users and in turn their predators, causing a general decline in wildlife populations, a slowing of the spread of spores into newly impacted areas and diminishing the number of types. We can be sure it will be a long time before the water storage capacity of the forest is repaired, and that strong storms will cause conditions to deteriorate before they are fully recovered.