Two years ago, the area around Fox Creek, Alta., was a charred wasteland. On May 5, 2023, a wildfire galloped towards the town of 1,900 residents in northwest Alberta. A crackling wall of flame tore through trees and vegetation producing thick columns of black smoke. Residents were forced to evacuate for 19 days.
In the end, Fox Creek was spared, but the surrounding area wasn’t. The close call has woken the town to the evolving dangers of wildfires in the area. In response, it’s introduced new measures: bulking up its firefighting resources, introducing public awareness campaigns, creating firebreaks, and conducting controlled burns. But most innovative of all is its mycological research project.
Looking for research opportunities, a town employee came across Boulder Mushroom in Colorado, a company that studies the use of fungi to prevent the spread of wildfires by decomposing man-made wood piles. Intrigued, the town reached out to Michael Schulz, a professor at Portage College and a member of the Alberta Mycological Society. The town’s hope was that Schulz could replicate Boulder Mushroom’s research around Fox Creek. After hearing the town’s pitch, Schulz signed on.
The project will attempt to reduce the amount of wildfire fuel close to the community by targeting slash piles and waste wood. These are stacks of brush and branches produced by commercial logging operations and development. Fox Creek has also been fire-smarting in the surrounding forested areas, thinning out the density of trees. This has left piles of wood chips.
“We’re going to try and figure out ways to inoculate [those piles] with local species of fungi that will help to increase their moisture content and break them down a lot faster than they would otherwise, reducing that fire risk,” says Schulz.
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But the tricky part is figuring out which fungi are most effective. Thankfully, fungi are an area of expertise for Schulz. He’s performed conservation assessments and data collection for Environment and Climate Change Canada’s Wild Species Reports on all 4,635 species of macrofungi in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
This spring through to the fall, Schulz and his team will venture into the Fox Creek area and collect fungi samples. “The fall collection is going to be done with the Alberta Mycological Society’s Great Alberta Mushroom Foray, which is a big event we hold every year,” says Schulz. “We’re going to be utilizing some citizen science to help us in getting some large areas scouted for lots of fungi.”
For this first round, Schulz says the team will focus on fungi that grow on spruce trees. He chose spruce because it’s a common species in the area and tends to be a fire hazard.
Once collected, the samples will be tested on spruce wood chips in a lab to see which fungi decompose the wood the fastest. Schulz says he’s hoping to have a top 10 list of the most effective fungi by next spring. Then his team will start field trials, inoculating wood piles around Fox Creek with the fungi.
If effective, the process could prove an environmentally friendly alternative to the current method of getting rid of slash piles: burning. Logging companies often burn slash piles to get rid of them fast, but this isn’t great for the environment. Burning the wood releases carbon dioxide, contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. It also scorches the earth. On the other hand, fungi decomposing the wood adds nutrients to the soil and creates food for other species, bolstering the ecosystem.
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These additional nutrients are essential in logged areas, says Schulz. The health of logged areas diminishes the more they’re harvested. “When we harvest areas regularly as part of a typical forest rotation, all the nutrients in that wood that’s harvested are lost,” he says. “They don’t magically come back into the soil.” By decomposing the wood piles with fungi, it could make up for those lost nutrients.
Once Schulz has nailed down the decomposition process, he’s confident that it could be expanded to the rest of Canada. The one thing he cautions is that people use local species of fungi. “We don’t want to change the ecology of the natural fungi that are present by introducing new genetics or introducing new species.”
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