Wildfires may not be an imminent concern in rain-soaked Sitka, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from them. Sitkans packed the main room at the public library Thursday night (11-30-23) for a talk on fungi, forests, and fires from visiting Outer Coast faculty member Caroline Daws.
Daws, whose research at Stanford focuses on how fungi interact with trees such as California redwoods, said certain types of fungi help trees thrive by making nutrients more accessible. That means healthier forests. Wildfires, though, can knock out some of those good fungi.
While wildfires aren’t a big risk in Southeast, Daws said that global climate change more broadly may affect those helpful fungi. And because certain fungi tend to associate with certain types of trees, changes to the underground ecosystem could affect what kinds of trees thrive in the forests. In California, redwoods may be more vulnerable when fire damages their fungal partners. In Sitka, cedars rely on similar fungi.
“There are also these important dynamics between trees that are associated with one type of mycorrhizal fungus or another here in Sitka,” Daws said. “So, cedars are associating with the same type as redwood, whereas Sitka Spruce are associated with the same type as Doug Fir. We might see that there are also similar kinds of interactions going on here.”
Daws said understanding what’s going on below the surface, whether in a redwood forest or a stand of yellow cedar in the Tongass, could help scientists understand and predict changes to the forests.
“I think there are a lot of ways in which understanding what’s going on below ground, even the things that we can’t see or maybe don’t care to eat, might be affecting how these forests are going to respond to things like changes in snowpack in the winter, changes in temperature, or year-round changes in precipitation availability,” Daws said.
You can find more information on Daws and her research here.
