{"id":546741,"date":"2026-03-19T12:39:11","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T12:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546741\/"},"modified":"2026-03-19T12:39:11","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T12:39:11","slug":"how-fire-fungi-help-put-burnt-landscapes-back-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/546741\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u201cFire Fungi\u201d Help Put Burnt Landscapes Back Together"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ecologists have long studied how life returns after a devastating wildfire. In British Columbia forests, for instance, wildflowers, such as fireweed, and grasses are often\u00a0the first plants to poke through the charred soil<\/a>. Shrubs come next, then seedlings like aspens and willows. Animals also trickle in: Woodpeckers feast on the insects hiding in dead trees, while deer and elk devour tender shoots and berry-laden shrubs.<\/p>\n

Yet in the grand succession of life after a wildfire, the first beings to appear are neither plants nor animals, but fungi. Species of pyrophilous fungi\u2014from Greek for \u201cfire-loving\u201d\u2014thrive in the burned terrain. Just weeks after a blaze tears through a landscape, swaths of fungal fruiting bodies emerge from the soil to release spores, briefly dominating the otherwise-barren surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of them make little, teeny-tiny, adorable, all-colors-of-the-rainbow cups,\u201d says\u00a0Monika Fischer, a mycologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. These fire fungi carpet the recently scorched earth with splashes of warm ocher, deep mauve, fleshy pink, and bright orange. Now, Fischer and other researchers are updating the ecological succession playbook, studying these fungi up close to find out exactly what they are and what they\u2019re capable of.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey really seem like the first responders,\u201d says Fischer. \u201cThey\u2019re the things that are growing the most rapidly first.\u201d So, whatever these fungi are up to\u2014biologically speaking\u2014likely impacts the rest of post-fire succession and recovery, she says.<\/p>\n

Relatively little is known about these fire-loving fungi. Many do not have common names, and many more species are likely still awaiting identification. Nevertheless, researchers believe pyrophilous fungi have an important role to play in a world that\u00a0is increasingly prone to severe wildfires<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As well as\u00a0killing or driving off<\/a>\u00a0most of the life in an ecosystem, high-intensity wildfires, which can reach temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius (2,000 degrees Fahrenheit<\/a>), leave behind a landscape that is largely inhospitable to new growth.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

After the 2021 Caldor Fire in California, researchers found fire loving fungi from the peziza and tricharina genuses thriving on the burnt soil. Photograph courtesy of Monika Fischer<\/p>\n

\u201cIn an extreme forest fire, the top layer of soil and stuff basically burns\u2014along with any organisms that are in there\u2014and turns into pyrolyzed organic material,\u201d says\u00a0Matt Traxler, a microbiologist at the University of California, Berkeley, who oversaw some of Fischer\u2019s previous work.<\/p>\n

Pyrolyzed organic material, essentially soot and charcoal, is mostly carbon, but it\u2019s not in a form that\u2019s easy for organisms to use, Traxler says. The carbon atoms form rings, which are then fused together into complicated clumps. \u201cVery few microbes\u2014or very few organisms\u2014could just take that in to try to eat it,\u201d he says. This burned substance also contains toxic compounds called\u00a0polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons<\/a>.<\/p>\n

And yet, pyrophilous fungi seem to thrive in this otherwise unwelcoming soil. In laboratory experiments, Fischer and Traxler showed that one iconic post-fire species\u2014Pyronema domesticum<\/a>\u2014can grow even when burnt soil is the only carbon source around. When growing in the pyrolyzed material, this resourceful little fungus turns on genes to produce enzymes to help break down the charred material, ultimately transforming it into a more bioavailable form that could help kick-start the rest of the food web. \u201cThey\u2019re sort of jump-starting that nutrient cycling,\u201d Fischer says.\u00a0A recent study<\/a>\u00a0from scientists at the University of California, Riverside, revealed that other species of pyrophilous fungi also possess key charcoal-digesting genes.<\/p>\n

Fischer and other scientists think that aside from making carbon more accessible, fire fungi play an important role in revitalizing the structure of the soil after a severe burn. In a big fire, says mycologist Karen Hughes of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, burnt soil forms a water-resistant, waxy coating that prevents water from seeping into the land. This makes the area\u00a0more prone to landslides<\/a>\u00a0and leads to dry, crumbly soil that is difficult for seeds to grow in.<\/p>\n

But after the 2016 wildfires in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which straddles North Carolina and Tennessee, Hughes and her collaborators surveyed the local\u00a0fungal biodiversity<\/a>.\u00a0They found networks of mycelial mats\u2014tangled webs of the fine, root-like structures that many fungi use to absorb water and nutrients\u2014which could help stabilize soils after a fire.\u00a0Other researchers<\/a>\u00a0have observed similar structures following wildfires in the northwest U.S. and in southeastern Australia.<\/p>\n

For her part, Fischer thinks fire fungi\u2014and the mycelial mats they create\u2014likely play a big role in helping seeds germinate and get established after a fire. But it will take more work to prove that connection. Traxler adds that while scientists are developing a better understanding of the fungal communities that proliferate after a fire, it\u2019s not yet clear how initial differences in these communities could ripple out to affect the long-term pace of recovery, or the diversity of plants and animals that eventually recolonize the land.<\/p>\n

A lot of work still needs to be done, Hughes acknowledges. With as many as\u00a0five million species<\/a>\u00a0of fungi living on the planet, there is, to put it mildly, \u201ca ton of stuff we don\u2019t know,\u201d she says. But by studying all facets of the fungi that flourish after a fire, Fischer says scientists could turn that knowledge into a tool kit to help promote post-fire regeneration.<\/p>\n

Photograph courtesy of Monika Fischer (used with permission)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ecologists have long studied how life returns after a devastating wildfire. In British Columbia forests, for instance, wildflowers,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":546742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[49,48,66],"class_list":["post-546741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=546741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/546741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/546742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=546741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=546741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=546741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}