How fungi is being used to grow superplants in bid to restore damaged grasslands

Adriana Morrell thinks fungi have a lot of secret abilities, and in her lab at Lethbridge Polytechnic, she's busy trying to find out what they are.

"It's all about starting to think about this completely hidden world and flipping those little lids and finding who's in there and what they do for us," she said.

"It's just that they need the attention."

As some of the oldest organisms on earth, fungi are ubiquitous in ecosystems across the planet, but Morrell says there is still a lot we don't know about them.

That's why one of the lids she's been flipping over recently is that of something called arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). It's a microscopic organism she thinks could play a crucial role in helping plants thrive in places where soil has been disturbed, and where ecosystems have been altered by agricultural or industrial processes.

By injecting native grasses with AMF and other beneficial bacteria, Morrell hopes that grasslands degraded by activity near the Leitch Collieries — an active coal mine in the Crowsnest Pass from 1907 to 1915 — can be restored to their former glory by creating, in effect, "superplants" charged with the beneficial fungi and bacteria.

"These fungi … they live in the soil and they associate with the plants, providing nutrients and water for the plants that these plants can't reach on their own. And then the plants in return provide carbohydrates for the fungi to thrive," she said.

"So it's a very good friendship and partnership between these fungi and the plant, and it occurs naturally in the ecosystem."

The four-year project, which began this summer and will continue into 2028, is driven by the Mycology Research Lab at Lethbridge Polytechnic and funded by Alberta Innovates. It will take place on two 100-square-metre sites on property owned by the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC), one of the country's largest land conservation organizations.

The sites are some of the most challenging across the NCC's property around the historic Leitch Collieries, meaning they haven't been successfully restored using traditional methods, said Morrell.

"The sites have [experienced] several disturbances that are associated with coal mining, like grading, levelling to build structures, gravel extraction, and there was cattle in the area as well.… Some areas have been left to recover naturally and some areas are struggling to thrive, so we're trying to focus on those areas."

Morrell's work, which will be undertaken with her co-principal investigator, Srijak Bhatnagar of Athabasca University, is part of a growing trend in the world of mycology (the study of mushrooms and fungi) that looks at using the wide cast of characters in the fungal kingdom to restore places that have experienced environmental damage, or even mitigate environmental risks.

In Colorado, mushrooms have been used to fight wildfires, and in the Skeena watershed in northwestern British Columbia, a team of researchers is using fungi to break down old creosote-contaminated railway ties, and reclaim slash piles left behind by logging operations.

"Basically, we are just using what's already in nature to see if [it] can help us establish and improve these very important ecosystems," said Morrell.