Wildfire and Fungi: Understanding the Fungi that Love Fire

The Humboldt Bay Mycological Society's first meeting of the year with presenter Dylan Enright. Link to the meeting: https://redwoods-edu.zoom.us/j/92471790552. Description of the talk: Due to global climate change, increased development along the edge of wildland areas, and policies of wildfire suppression, wildfires have become more frequent and more severe, altering healthy fire regimes into something devastating and catastrophic. This new class of severe wildfire has been coined the “mega-fire” and it is vital we understand how it will affect our natural ecosystems. Dylan's research has explored the effect of the 2016 Soberanes mega-fire on soil fungi in a redwood and tanoak forest in Big Sur, CA and is now moving toward understanding how individual fungi are adapted to wildfire. The will describe how the effects observed in their study compare to the existing knowledge on fungi and fire and their hypotheses on how some of these fungi might be adapted to wildfire.