Nasa

Mycorrhizal fungi are more like cities than individual plants; these are complex systems which stretch for miles underground in search for nutrients.

So massive and impactful are they, Nasa has now been able to identify them from space.


Researchers say it could finding and studying these networks could help them predict how climate change will affect forest ecosystems. "Individual tree species have unique spectral fingerprints," said Joshua Fisher, lead author of the study. "But we thought the underlying fungi could be controlling them as groups."

Two types of the fungi control different sets of trees, with each type responding differently to climate change. Knowing where each type is dominant "may help us predict where forests will thrive in the future and where they'll falter", the team says.

Ceating fungi maps to chart this growth has proved difficult, as it has traditionally depended on "counting individual tree species". So the team decided to detect the network via satellite.

Using the "spectral signature" of the trees -- that is, the pattern that the tree's canopies reflect -- the satellite can differentiate between the trees. Four forests were analysed during the project -- around 130,000 trees and 77 species -- by Nasa's Landsat-5 satellite. The images were then analysed using a statistical model that was able to predict where the different types of fungus were most prevalent. This model, the team say, had around 77 percent accuracy. "That these below-ground agents manifest themselves in changes in the forest canopies is significant," said Fisher. "This allows, for the first time, some light to be shed on their hidden processes."