Making hollow trees: Inoculating living trees with wood-decay fungi for the conservation of threatened taxa - A guide for conservationists
2022
Wainhouse, Matt | Boddy, Lynne
Decaying wood and cavities in living trees are fundamental determinants of forest biodiversity.However, a long history of forestry and land-use change has created a fragmented network ofwoodland with a depleted stock of veteran trees that support these microhabitats. Decomposition isa slow process and it may take heart-rot fungi hundreds of years to establish before hollowing evenbegins. A major challenge to forest restoration, therefore, is how these habitats can be restored orreplicated. One approach is to inoculate trees with heart-rot fungi as a direct intervention toaccelerate tree hollowing. We identify two types of conservation inoculation that could be beneficialin forest conservation: (1) Veteranising inoculations designed to benefit cavity and decay dependantfauna; and (2) Translocation inoculations, to reintroduce locally extinct, dispersal-limited heart-rotfungi.Tree inoculations have a hundred-year pedigree but successes have been mixed and there are nolong-term published studies. Reflecting on previous heart-rot inoculations we discuss elements ofthe inoculation protocol to aid design of conservation inoculations. Conservation inoculations havethe potential to be a useful tool in forest restoration and we hope to stimulate wider uptake as adirect method for conservation.
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