Prof Katie Field, 'More than a mushroom: how fungi shape our world'

Katie Field, Professor of Plant-Soil-Processes at the University of Sheffield, delivers an Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum's Autumn 2022 Science Lecture entitled: 'More than a mushroom: how fungi shape our world'.

500 million years ago, Earth looked very difference to how it does today. Without land plants, the continents were barren with only a biocrust covering the surfaces. When the first plants made landfall onto Earth’s barren continental landmasses around 450-500 million years ago, they did so with the help of microscopic filamentous fungi. These fungi helped those earliest plants access the nutrients they needed from rocks, allowing them to flourish on the land surface. Since then, fungi have played a fundamental part in sculpting Earth’s landscapes, ecosystems and even global climate through their decomposing and nutrient cycling activities and through their intimate and extensive partnerships with plant roots.

Today, there are nearly 150,000 species within the Kingdom Fungi that we know about, with many, many more yet to be discovered. As such, there is much that remains to be revealed about the roles and significance of fungi in global ecosystems, both in the past and their potential for the future with great opportunities to exploit the powers of fungi to improve sustainability, from carbon capture in soils to improving future food security in a changing climate. Katie's talk explores the past, present and potential future roles of fungi in Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems, and why we should consider fungi as being very much more than just mushrooms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8L-2SIFvjfY