Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

But for the really good stuff at Kew, you have to look below the ground. Tucked underneath a laboratory at the garden’s eastern edge is the fungarium: the largest collection of fungi anywhere in the world. Nestled inside a series of green cardboard boxes are some 1.3 million specimens of fruiting bodies

In the hierarchy of environmental causes, fungi have traditionally ranked somewhere close to the bottom, Davies says.

In a laboratory just above the Kew fungarium, mycologist Laura Martinez-Suz studies how fungi help sequester carbon in the soil, and why some places seem much better at storing soil carbon than others. (...) There are around 1.5 trillion tons of organic carbon stored in soils across the world — about twice the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. (...) One study of forested islands in Sweden found that the majority of carbon in the forest soil actually came from root-fungi networks, not plant matter fallen from above the ground.

Around 90 percent of plant species are known to make these symbiotic trade networks with different species of fungi.

This has serious implications for tree-planting schemes.