Search


	Podcast:		UC Science Today
	Episode:		How a fire revealed the natural resilience of forests
	Category:		Science & Medicine
	Duration:		00:01:04
	Publish Date:		2016-03-14 00:00:00
	Description:		When California’s catastrophic Rim Fire destroyed her study plots in the Sierra Nevada region, graduate student Sydney Glassman of the University of California, Berkeley found a nutrient-rich layer of fungi, known as ectomycorrhizal, had survived beneath the soil. "All of North America is covered with trees that are associated with ectomycorhizzal fungi. This is an obligate symbiosis, meaning that the fungus needs the plant and the plant needs the fungus, and neither will survive in nature without each other." Glassman had a rare opportunity to document this symbiotic relationship in the aftermath of a fire. "Fires are obviously really important to study but they’re just really difficult to study, because you don’t know when a fire’s going to occur. Some fungi can make spores, and they can persist in the soil and survive. Once water comes and once a plant comes for them to colonize, then they’ll germinate. We were able to actually access our plots and resample the exact same locations that we had sampled before the fire, within 3 weeks of the fire. And that was really remarkable. The fungi that I thought were going to survive the disturbance, did. I think that there’s a lot of natural resilience built into forests."
	Total Play:		0