🍄Mycorrhizal Fungi
As human populations evolved from hunter-gatherers to farmers, most of the crops they planted depended on mycorrhizal fungi. Early agricultural practices caused little disturbance to soil, and even when farmers began using beasts of burden to break up the soils, the presence of mycorrhizae was sustained.
Unfortunately, modern agricultural practices rely on heavy machinery, heavy soil disturbance, periods of fallow, artificial chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fumigants, and sometimes soil sterilization. These practices, as well as others, disrupt and destroy the establishment of mycorrhizae in agricultural soils.
So far a total of 122 fungal species has been reported in Turkey [7]. One of them is mycorrhiza. After settling on plant root cortex, mycorrhizal fungi becomes a part of the internal environment by releasing hyphae into the cortex. The fast-growing hyphae provides water and mineral nutrients from the outside to the inwards and organic substances from the inside out. By its nature this symbiosis is very active in providing nutrient cycling and plant vitality in the eco-system. Environmental temperature and humidity, ventilation, light and presence of organic matter are important factors for mycorrhizal activity. And a large number of plant which create a symbiotic partnership with fungi have been identified [1].
In conclusion, using mycorrhizae in agriculture will increase soil fertility, improve profitability and product quality also reduce input costs and environmental pollution based on agriculture.
While the understanding of soil carbon stabilization mechanisms is evolving, it is clear that soil biota plays an important role here. In general, there is a positive relationship between abundance of fungal biomass and soil carbon.(53) Recent research on carbon sequestration in boreal forests suggests that root-associated, or mycorrhizal, fungi are predominantly responsible for fixing soil carbon, and for fixing it over long time periods to such an extent that it is consequential to the global carbon cycle.(54)
Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi are root-symbiotic fungi that secrete a protein called glomalin; this particular fungi-root partnership and its glomalin are largely responsible for creating persistent, stable soil aggregates that protect soil carbon from being lost as CO2 (55,56)
The fungal hyphae actually increase in abundance under elevated atmospheric CO2 conditions. (57,58)
When the hyphae deteriorate, glomalin remains as a stable form of organic carbon that is held in the soil for decades.(56)
This initial shorter-term stabilization provides the time for organic matter to create bonds with metals and minerals, the resultant organo-mineral or organo-metal complexes can remain in the soil for millennia.(27)
Since mycorrhizal fungi need root-partners to survive, farming strategies that include perennial plantings, conservation tillage, and plants with long, bushy root systems, encourage the long-term stabilization of carbon in soils.59,60
Likewise, promising effects have been shown for inoculation of soils with fungi, especially in cases where heavy tillage has destroyed the native population of mycorrhizal fungi. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi can be introduced to seedlings through inoculations that are easily prepared on-farm. 61,62
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