“How do you supercharge vegetation growth for a reforestation project? Bring in the microorganisms.
That’s the finding from a new study, which shows that incorporating a microbial community of fungi, bacteria, algae and archaea into ecosystem restoration can accelerate plant biomass production by 64% on average.
Researchers say this application holds plenty of promise for restoration work in Southeast Asia, where large swaths of once-forested landscapes have been degraded for large-scale agriculture.
Soil microbiome like fungi carry out a critical task known as soil transplant, moving soil and associated microbial communities from one location to another. But they’re often overlooked in conservation and restoration efforts, said study lead author Colin Averill, a senior microbial and ecosystem scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH Zürich.
“When we think to plant a tree, we never think to ‘plant’ the microbiome, right? But what if we did?” Averill told Mongabay.
To find out how big a role the microbiome plays in ecosystem restoration, Averill and colleagues from ETH Zürich, the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands pored over the date from 27 restoration projects that incorporated microbial restoration.
Their study, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, found that across all the restoration works, there was an average of 64% increase of plant growth. In one case, plant growth was stimulated by 700%.
The study shows that incorporating the microbiome in managed landscapes like farmland and forestry concessions has the greatest potential. This is because managed landscapes account for the majority of human land use, covering half of the global habitable land surface.
But by introducing microbial communities, these agricultural and forestry plantations [and monocultures] that are currently devoid of biodiversity could become reservoirs of it, Averill said.
To increase biodiversity and enrich these managed landscapes, it’s important to avoid using single species or very low-diversity, non-native soil organisms at a large scale, Averill said.
The study notes an increasing number of microbial inoculant companies advocating for just this on the argument that it could improve crop yields. But the mass application of a single species could lead to a loss of genetic and ecological diversity, and is unlikely to account for ecosystem-specific requirements, the study says.
It instead recommends using locally sourced, native and biodiverse communities of soil organisms as these can promote biodiversity in managed landscapes without limiting crop yields.” -via Mongabay, 1/5/23
Queued this one to my main by accident. Whoops! Anyway, here you go