[Gabriel Popkin] Most trees have been discovered,
given a scientific name, and put into the scientific literature.
With fungi, it's almost the reverse.
Fewer than 10% actually have been discovered and named.
This new organization called the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks,
they had gotten quite a large amount of money from a foundation.
It seemed pretty unique to have a whole society devoted just to
one kind of fungi, the kind that makes these underground networks
The researchers were able to use 1000s of samples that have been collected,
geo-located are all in this database, to feed into their computer model to
tell them where to go.
Different areas of the map popped up as potentially having a lot of interesting fungi that hadn't
been studied, and certain parts of Chile were among those.
[Toby Kiers] This area is known as the lungs of southern Chile because the forests are
so rich and producing so much oxygen.
But you can think of the underground as the circulatory system to match that forest.
Toby, she really pioneered methods for studying fungi
in the lab at a very micro scale.
She has partnered with Giuliana Furci, who's a field scientist.
She helped get this law passed in Chile that protects fungi.
[Giuliana Furci] If we don't look after the underground reservoirs of biodiversity,
we won't have the symbiotic organisms that we need for trees to establish in degraded lands.
[Gabriel Popkin] Then a third major player in it was Merlin Sheldrake, who’s a British independent mycologist.
[Merlin Sheldrake] We are sampling soil at different sites, by a grid of nine points.
We mix this together and create one sample, which we'll then take to a lab.
We extract the DNA from all the organisms in the soil.
And then we sequence the DNA, which will help us to find out who's living here.
And we combine them into a very, very large dataset, which allows us to make maps of the
world's mycorrhizal fungal network, and to make predictions about what we expect to find.
These maps will then be able to form a basis
for conservation initiatives.
[Gabriel Popkin] There are places where these computer models suggest there might be high
fungal biodiversity that are not necessarily being protected for what's above ground.
One of the arguments for putting more effort towards studying fungi is that many of them
could have important uses that we don't know about.
These tiny arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, we could be using them potentially to grow healthier
forests, faster growing tree plantations to produce more wood on a smaller area, perhaps
which would allow the protection of other forests that don't need to be logged.
People thing that fungi could play a role in climate change
because the fungi take up carbon and some of that carbon
might stay in the soil long term.
A few people I spoke with, interacte with, seem to feel like, despite being one of the biggest
efforts to go out and study fungi at the global scale, it might actually not be big enough to
really, actually accomplish its goals.
The scientists are not going to be able to sample everywhere.
So one of the ways they're trying to get around that is to give out these mini grants
to mycologists in different parts of the world.
And then those people will go out and sample in their own regions.
They have goals to sample Mongolia, Africa, a remote island in the Pacific.
[Toby Kiers] We're aiming in the next 18 months to get 10,000 samples.
And if you imagine that each one of those samples is nine different points
where we actually put this core into the earth.
It's 90,000 times where we just have to pause and think,
with all of our intentions, what is under here?
And what mysteries are we going to unveil?