thank you thank you all for coming where I come from in the tradition I brought up in this is the Festival of Easter it's the Festival of Rebirth of new beginnings uh of rediscovering the vital uh Unstoppable life force that powers this planet so it's an extra special time I think to be gathered here together together uh thinking forwards uh remembering backwards and coming together in the present to find new ways to rise to the challenge of living today at this unprecedented time I'm going to talk about fungi and I know there's been some discussion
of this already um so uh that makes things a little bit easier because I can assume that you all uh know about funy you know that this is a kingdom of Life uh you know that these are ecosystem Engineers that underwrite the regenerative capacity of the Living World you know that there are lots of ways to be a fungus I'm going to talk about a specific group of fungi called micar risal fungi and I know you've also heard something of micar risal fungi which is great um so I can just give a small recap uh
and um micar risal fungi A fungi that forms very intimate uh and ancient relationships with plants and I'm going to ask here I'm going to hold the focus steady on the question of how can we nourish generative relationships with mic risal fungi to support the flourishing of life on Earth and to help address the coupled crisis of climate change and biodiversity loss so um almost all plants depend on micro Riz fungi and these are fungi that form mycelial networks uh which are branching fusing networks of tubular cells and these fungi are uh brilliant they're chemical
Wizards they're brilliant Navigators in the wild wet world of the soil they're able to grow and remodel their bodies uh and forage using their chemical Ingenuity for nutrients nutrients that plants need like nitrogen and phosphorus they acquire these nutrients and they Supply these nutrients to their plant partners and the plant partners uh in exchange for these nutrients they provide the fungi with things that the fungi need to grow um energy containing carbon compounds like sugars and fats that the plants have made in photosynthesis so this is a very intimate relationship uh this image shows a
micrograph at the plant material of a root the plant materials in gray um and the fungus is the micro risal fungus is in red in the image on the left the root is present in the image on the right the root has been faded out and you can see just quite how intense these relationships can be and uh this is really an intermingling of bodies it's one of the living world's great intimacies I I suppose I would say that but I really do believe it um and it is um yeah an astonishing way that organis
come together to extend their reach and to make things possible that wouldn't otherwise be possible now this is really actually the roots of Life on land uh plants would only make it out of water onto the land with the help of their fungal Associates who behaved as their root systems for tens of millions of years until plants could evolve their own Roots this image shows a different type of Micro risal fungus an ector micro risal fungus and you can see these root tips with a mycelial sleeve over them and you can see the mycelial network
extending out into the soil navigating this multi-dimensional Labyrinth of the soil and doing um the magic that they are able to do um these are sophisticated relationships it's very important to understand uh at any one moment a micro risal fungus will be remodeling itself to explore the soil one of the most complex habitats on the planet it will be um doing crazy things with its metabolism to forage and acquire nutrients it will be forming relationships with crowds of microbes um across its Network it'll be diverting nutrients around its Network circulating them in just the right
way to enable it to trade with its plant partners it must be integrating information across an immense number of nodes which at any one moment can be strung between multiple plants and sprawled over meters in this video you can see in real time the flow of carbon of lipids fats through a micro risal fungal Network um and just to give you a sense of these organisms as circulatory systems so the influence of these quadrillions of trading decisions spills out over land masses and continents a recent study that Toby and I were part of found that
um micro risal fun fungi funnel around 13 billion tons of CO2 into the soil every year that's as much as a third of the total CO2 emissions produced by the burning of fossil fuels every year it's a significant amount of carbon they stabilize this carbon in the soil uh and um and power soil food webs uh which could contain over half of of all species on the planet so globally the total length of micro risal fungal mycelium in the top 10 cens of soil is um more than 450 quadrillion kilometers which is um over half
of the width of the Galaxy these organisms are stationed at a vital point in global carbon and nutrient cycles and they make up one of the circulatory systems of the planet an ancient life support system system that easily qualifies as one of the wonders of the living world but despite their roles in supporting planetry biodiversity in regulating the Earth's nutrient cycles and climate micro risal fungi are a global blind spot largely absent from climate change agendas conservation strategies uh restoration strategies Agriculture and Forestry this is a problem it's a problem first because micro risal fungi
lie at the base of the food webs that sustain much of life on Earth and make a key lever in planetary ecology and yet hardly anyone is touching this lever it would be like trying to perform life saving life-saving surgery without taking into account the circulatory systems of our body bodies it's a problem for another reason what we are blind to We tend to destroy the destruction of underground ecosystems uh accelerates climate change biodiversity loss and uh what more when we disrupt these communities we destroy an ancient library of solutions that fungi have evolved to
rise to the challenge of living uh we have no idea how many of these Solutions might prove vital to life on Earth moving forward when micro risal fungies suffer so do the organisms uh and the ecosystems that depend on them so back to this question how can we nourish generative relationships with these ancient life support systems to support the flourishing of life on Earth and respond to climate and biodiversity crisis I'm going to describe two projects that I work on with Toby and Toby has summarized these briefly uh the first is as T says this
Grand very big zoomed out perspective it's the society for the protection of underground networks or spun and spun is trying to answer this question by taking a Global Perspective using huge data sets to map the micro risal communities of the planet and advocate for their protection the second approach zooms all the way in we we use Advanced microscopy robotics machine learning tools to look inside micro risal fungi to try and decode the flows and behavioral dialects of these living sensing networks uh in both of these projects we are seeking partners and funders uh and collaborators
and resources so if you do feel moved please do get in touch uh you can find various ways to do that on my website so one of the ways we can form relationships with these ancient life support systems is by stopping destroying them and um spun's work is trying to facilitate this there are lots of threats to underground ecosystems despite the fact that we think about them less than we should deforestation desertification over application of industrial um agricultural chemicals like fungicides and um fertilizers um over plowing any number of things the list goes on uh
the combination the result of all of this combination is that uh based on current trends 90% of the Earth's soils will be degraded by 2050 so spun is an organization working to map and protect micro risal fungal communities and in doing so find find ways to harness their power uh to help mitigate and adapt to climate and biodiversity crisis why map well one of the reasons is that we know very very little about who lives where underground we have maps of ocean currents we have maps of global vegetation we have maps of global climate um
we don't have maps of mic risal fungal communities this limits our ability to Monitor and to protect these key underground ecosystems it limits our ability to work out which are the most important underground ecosystems to Monitor and protect so um spun's working to make these Maps make reliable maps that can inform decision makers and support legal actions to protect land from ecosocial exploitation and to do so we are um we are supporting the creation of a network a decentralized network of scientists around the world um and funding people funding these researchers and local communities to
answer um micro risal questions in their in their places in their homes uh in the ecosystems that they care about um and all of this data comes back uh to feed the very big models that we're making to build the global maps um and it's a really exciting situation we have uh so many um so many wild enthusiastic Michael risle researchers coming out of the woodwork we building capacity for micro Rosal research in uh in all over the world and especially in places where this research has been less um This research has happened much less
and there's researchers in the Ivory Coast studying caca plantations researchers in Mexico using um these micro Rizal diversity uh maps to engage local politicians to protect water sources um there are people comparing the communities in humid and dry forests in Madagascar is hugely exciting we're inundated with enthus and request and actually really struggling to keep up uh and this is uh hugely gratifying um so to build these Maps we are um we're taking thousands and thousands of these data points um which are these data sets themselves being used to answer local questions in local places
um but then come together to make these uh large data sets which we uh then interpret using machine learning models that predict for every kilometer on the planet uh every pixel of Earth on the planet it uh the micro risal fungal diversity for the two main classes of micro risal fungi and um this is um a big project it's it's computationally intensive it's hugely exciting and the result is something like this uh this map shows in brighter colors it shows the areas of Greater micro risal diversity this is for Ecto micro risal funi one of
the big classes of micral fungi the darker areas the blue areas are areas of lower ector micro Ral fungal diversity and one of the things that's interesting about this map is that it looks very different from a map of global diversity taking into account only organisms that live above ground usually if you were to make a map of global bi diversity you would just look at the organisms living above ground and you would find that diversity was concentrated around the tropical regions and phased out as you went towards the poles but that's not the case
here there are mismatches between biodiversity above ground and below ground and this is one of the reasons why it's so important to take these below ground communities into account as we try to work out who lives where and what everyone's doing um so here you can see there are very high concentrations of ector micro Ral diversity around boreal forests in these more Northerly latitudes so building these maps of micro risal fungal communities can help us to approach above ground life from the perspective of the low ground organisms so why does this matter well we think
that these Maps can help inform climate change strategies restoration practices um Land Management of All Sorts um and legal actions uh these Maps reveal that over 90% of micro risal fungal hotspots are currently fall falling outside protected areas which means that they're at immediate risk um it doesn't shouldn't surprise us now we have not been taken into account when we've prioritized our areas for conservation but this is nonetheless a little shocking and certainly worrying um and I think really should motivate uh the Turning of our attention towards these underground communities so we're trying to quantify
these threats uh and we have and here is a map that shows what we call an integrated threat index um combining different kinds of threat to micro risal fungal ecosystem micro fungal communities and underground ecosystems the bright areas are areas of high threat the darker areas the Bluer areas of lower threat and um and then we can integrate the threat to micro risal fungal communities with micro risal fungal diversity and that's what you see here so the the brighter yellow areas if you look at the top left you'll see a little um key um so
the brighter yellow areas are areas of high diversity which are currently under a high level of threat The Greener areas are high diversity under a lower level of threat um and the brighter red areas are low diversity areas under high threat and um and the darker red areas uh the low diverse areas under lower threat and so this is the kind of map that can form the basis for tools that we're developing to um to try and get these lives and the processes they oversee into the systems that we are making into the systems that
humans are designing into the hands of decision makers to empower them to make decisions to uh support micro risal fungal life and to support the processes that they oversee so I I've been barking on about diversity and um there's a reason for this it's not just about the number of micro risal fungal CES living in a given Place uh is because often when it comes to micro risal fungi diversity really matters the um vital processes that micro risal fungi oversee um are coupled with micro risal fungal diversity so what we see for example is in
areas of high eor micral fungal diversity there are um very high soil carbon stocks um so we can map these here you can see soil carbon stocks mapped together uh integrated with micro Rizal fungal diversity to start to build a picture not only of who's living where but also what everyone might be doing and that really matters what everyone might be doing so thinking about fungi makes the world look different um approaching above ground life from a perspective of the below ground life can really help us to uh deepen and expand our understanding of planetary
ecology and one project I'm really excited about right now is a collaboration uh to test the application of this kind of fungal data set in legal actions um we're working together with the more than human rights Collective some of whom are right here um we're working together with the fungi Foundation uh we're working together with the saraku people of Amazonian Ecuador uh and together with the Saku people we're going to go uh to visit the territory and we're going to map the micro risal communities of their territory and provide them with these data sets which
they can then use in their ongoing legal battles with the Ecuadorian government uh and use these data sets to make sure that the underground communities are [Applause] protected uh because so much of the threats that these ecosystems face is from mining which explicitly destroys the underground so we're really we're really thrilled at how this is unfolding we're thrilled about these um coalitions that we're building and where this can go so the second part um I wanted to discuss is how we might form high functioning relationships with micro risal fungi by understanding how they do what
they do and for this we have to zoom right in to make the invisible visible and to study their behavior in real time remember micro risal fungi are bathed in Rich fields of sensory information they must determine when where and how to move resources across their networks um they must integrate Myriad data streams across billions of nodes in their networks these are complex information processing system systems solving non-trivial problems on a momentto moment basis and we have no idea how they can do what they do to achieve the astonishing Feats that they achieve right these
ecosystem Engineers so in Amsterdam with to's lab the lab of Tom Shimizu a key biophysicist collaborator um we and amazing amazing teams in these Labs working to decode the language of fungal information processing um to allow to ask how fungi are able to coordinate these flows um to make decisions to process information and how to do what they do um so to do this we have a custombuilt Imaging robot you can see it here this is generation one we're working on generation 2 um and uh this robot allows us to quantify both the architecture of
the fungal Network so the the branching patterns you can think of that as the um the map of the road in a city but also the flows within the network so you can think of this as the traffic movement on the roads within the city and we need to know both uh because it's in the flows that they're encoding information but they're only able to do that by creating the network and remodeling the network within which that information is Flowing so um it's something like this you see on on the left you can see the
uh the growing Network in timelapse so that's sped up on the right you can see flows in real time within a micro risal fungal Network and we can get both of these levels of information and start to integrate them um and the current system can track U over half a million fungal nodes across space and time this is all uh a very exciting study it's in review at nature right now and we're thrilled to see where this will go but I really want to show you these videos of these flows and invite you to look
at this so look at the way this is real time and and if you were the size if you could fit inside the network and ride on these flows it would feel like you were traveling at about 40 km an hour these are rapid flows of carbon and nutrients they're changing direction they're going in the opposite directions at once within the same section of pipe um crazy things are happening at these Branch points and it's really quite wild you know we get together in the lab and um here's what a video we love and we
get together in the lab and sit in darkened rooms and look at these videos like children and just pulling our hair out it's like how are they doing this look at this you see there's a blob a blob at that Junction in this video it's going up the right hand Branch now watch it it's going up the right hand branch and oh oh no no it's going to come right back down and what's going to oh God I what what's going [Applause] on that's one node in one small Network growing in one small dish in
one laboratory in Amsterdam so um what's great about these systems is so we can change the environmental conditions we can simulate different climate regimes we can simulate different nutrient regimes we can look at how the flows change we can look at how the funy are are designing their networks differently and um and so we can build and we are building High throughput data pipelines to um and machine learning models to start to combine all this information to decode these um systems of information processing to interpret this language of fungal information processing um and we want
you to used these to deepen and expand our ability to interact with these organisms so this is really it I think um the point that I'm trying to make that an understanding of micro risal fungi as Dynamic sensing information processing problem solving agents can pave the way for new types of collaboration with these ancient life support systems that have for so long nourished an enriched life on this planet these organisms are indispensable partners for humans as we navigate this time of Crisis and transformation and look forward to the future of life on a damaged Planet
thank you [Music] yeah
