There’s little doubt among scientists that the world is heating up.

In a hundred years, places like Kuwait and Mecca, Islam’s holiest city, could be too hot for humans. Same might be said for much of Arizona, where last year a single county tallied 130 heat-related deaths, the biggest such number in 15 years.

Kathleen Treseder, left, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology School of Biological Sciences at UCI and Alicia Hans, a high school student, gather soil and root samples to see what fungi were growing on plants in drought-simulated environments up in the Loma Ridge along the Toll Road in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

The mushrooms are the “fruit” that the soil fungi make to reproduce. UC Irvine scientist Kathleen Treseder and her team study how these fungi respond to climate change. (Photo by Kathleen Treseder)

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Michael Goulden, Associate Professor, Earth System Science,? School of Physical Sciences at UCI stands in the middle of one of the structures at Loma Ridge used for growing plants in drought-simulated environments in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

A research site out in the Loma Ridge area by the toll road is used to simulate drought environments in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Kathleen Treseder, left, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology School of Biological Sciences at UCI and Alicia Hans, a high school student, gather soil and root samples to see what fungi were growing on plants in drought-simulated environments up in the Loma Ridge along the Toll Road in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)



Alicia Hans, left, a high school student, Kathleen Treseder, center, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology School of Biological Sciences at UCI, and Michael Goulden, Associate Professor, Earth System Science ?School of Physical Sciences at UCI, right, walk through the high grasses out at Loma Ridge after gathering soil and root samples to see what fungi were growing on plants in drought-simulated environments in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

UC Irvine scientist Kathleen Treseder and her team are studying how fungi respond to climate change. The crocus is one of the first plants to bloom in the spring in Alaska. (Photo by Kathleen Treseder)

Kathleen Treseder, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology School of Biological Sciences at UCI takes a photo out at a field site up in the Loma Ridge along the Toll Road in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

A sample bag of soil and roots of grasses is collected for Kathleen Treseder, Professor, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology School of Biological Sciences at UCI to see what fungi were growing on plants in drought-simulated environments up in the Loma Ridge along the Toll Road in Irvine on Monday, June 26, 2017. (Photo by Sam Gangwer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

UCI researchers study how fungi respond to climate change. Above, a mushroom in a study site in Alaska. (Photo by Kathleen Treseder)



So, with the earth getting hotter, how do humans adapt? And where on earth (literally) should we focus efforts toward staving off the coming changes?

For answers, UC Irvine scientist Kathleen Treseder turns to an unexpected source:

Fungi.

Scary news

Treseder, an ecology professor who specializes in global warming, is a leader in an emerging area of study, one that looks at the role played by soil and its related components — including mushrooms and other fungi — when it comes to keeping carbon out of the atmosphere. Mushrooms and microscopic organisms that break down carbon-based stuff (i.e. all living things) are key players in Treseder’s work, broadly serving as clues about climate health.

What the fungi are telling Treseder is potentially scary.

As recently as a decade ago, the few scientists who looked at how soil affects global warming believed fungi were helpful in keeping the earth from overheating. A UC Irvine press release from 2008 described mushrooms as “an unexpected ally” in the fight against climate warming.

Now, the opposite might be true. Treseder and others believe that the fungi that spew carbon into the atmosphere (and, by doing so, generate more greenhouse gas) might reproduce faster in warmer climates. If true, fungi could be part of a gruesome, self-sustaining cycle — excessive heat generating a biological bi-product that generates more heat.

That could be crucial in the future. Right now, the ground holds about twice as much carbon as there is in the air. Keeping that ratio stable could be key to human survival.

“If the carbon is in the soil, it’s not in the atmosphere,” Treseder said, adding that, as of now, “the soils are doing an important service for us.”

So Treseder and her students are measuring the amount of carbon that is excreted by fungi and feeding that information to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Scientists from the center use that fungi data, along with information from scientists who study sea ice and the atmosphere, to create models of how the earth might change in the coming decades.

Those models predict sea level rise of up to 10 feet by the end of the century, Southern California losing up to 67 percent of its beaches and 12 times the number of extreme heat days.

“How microbial activity may change in the future…. is critical to projecting what the composition of the atmosphere may look like in 50 or 100 years,” said Will Wieder, a biogeochemist who specializes in carbon cycles at the non-profit University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.

Treseder’s work also is part of broader push to integrate biology — the study of living things — into the study of climate change.

“It’s truly a frontier,” said Jim Randerson, an earth system science professor at UC Irvine whose work focuses on the carbon spewed into the atmosphere by wildfires.

Long trip

For more than a decade, some 40 UCI faculty and students have made trips from Southern California to work briefly in greenhouses in Alaska, just outside Fort Greely near Delta Junction. These greenhouses mimic the climate of the future, a warmer world. The idea, Treseder said, is to study fungi in this future climate, to see which fungi grow the most and how much carbon they spew.

It’s not easy, and not just because the science is new and sometimes daunting. Moose sometimes flop down into the greenhouse, hoping to capture a bit of warmth in a biting cold winter. Bear sometimes pierce the greenhouse covering with their claws. Some have encountered bears face-to-face.

Logistics also can be tricky.

While working on her doctorate, UC Irvine graduate Adriana Romero Olivares would fly to Fairbanks, rent a four wheeler and work her way toward the test sites. On a good day the trek would take 45 minutes. On bad days, like those after a storm, the journey could last several hours. More than once, the four-wheeler got stuck in the mud.

“It was pretty wild,” Romero Olivares said.

While performing their research, many of Treseder’s doctoral student wore bells to notifying the wildlife in the area of her presence so as not to startle them.

While working in Treseder’s lab, Romero Olivares would sometimes take a sample, toss it into a cooler and immediately have to rush off to the airport to catch a flight back to Southern California to preserve the RNA captured in the soil.

“I had to be strategic,” Romero Olivares said. “Sometimes, samples were temperature-sensitive and you had to…. drive back to Fairbanks as fast as possible and catch a night flight back to Orange County. … It was the only way to take a snapshot of what was happening in that precise moment.”

Treseder doesn’t have to make the annual trek up to Alaska to see the effects of climate change on fungi and how dead plants decompose.

On a recent scorching Monday she visited drought-simulated sites run by UC Irvine professor Mike Goulden in the hills of the Irvine Ranch Conservancy land, about 20 minutes from the UCI campus. She waded through six-foot invasive oat grasses and mustard plants.

The drought simulations have received half as much rain as is typical and are filled with dying dry grass, the blades coated with a blackish dust that might be mistaken for pollution or dirt. But Treseder recognized the dust as fungi, and saw it as perhaps another portal into the story of climate change. In the past, she’s found fungi were less capable of decomposing tall dead plants during drought. She’s looking to see if that holds up.

Climate change has already affected Treseder’s ability to do her research. In the past decade, she’s bumped up the start of her research in the boreal forest in Alaska from late May to early May, a result of the now shorter growing season. It’s a message she didn’t expect to be so clear.

“When I first started doing the research I didn’t expected to see it myself,” Treseder said.

“I never thought it would be so obvious.”