Mushrooms, Yunnan and COP 15: protecting biodiversity

When I finished my PhD in Cape Town, South Africa, I decided to take one year off to travel and rock climb in Asia, not realizing how that decision would influence my future. Towards the end of my year of travels I came to Kunming, Southwest China’s Yunnan Province, for the purpose of rock climbing, and during that trip I was introduced to Professor Xu Jianchu who subsequently offered me a job and suggested I begin my professional career with his team at the Kunming Institute of Botany (KIB), Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). I saw the opportunity for what it was and readily agreed, and settled in to life in Yunnan. It is now 11 years later and I feel like it is still just the beginning of things to come.

I soon learned that the decision to stay and work at KIB was a good one. The facilities, funding, and opportunities for research, under the umbrella of CAS, were, and still are, unequalled. I was able to build a research team and start running research programs far quicker than I could have hoped for had I stayed in South Africa. Based on this I soon had a good team of young scientists working with me on the topic of soil ecology and fungal biogeography, and I was able to establish myself within the field of mycology quite quickly.

When I first came to Yunnan, I had no idea about the biodiversity found within this province, and had no appreciation for how many different kinds of fungi and more specifically, mushrooms, can be found within this region. Initially my research was on broader topics related to sustainable agriculture and agroforestry systems, but I quickly shifted focus to work exclusively on fungi, with a special interest and passion for mushrooms.

As most of you know, Yunnan is world famous for its edible mushrooms; nowhere else on the planet can you find so many different kinds of mushrooms in such a small geographical location. And this richness is also reflected in the diversity of other life forms found here, whether mammals, plants, and insects. Yunnan and the surrounding region is truly a natural scientist’s dream location for research.

With funding from the National Natural Sciences Foundation of China (NSFC) and from CAS, I began researching the diversity and biogeography of fungi in Yunnan, but after a few years I wanted to see how the results I was getting in Yunnan compared to the surrounding regions.

And so I began to conduct similar research in Thailand, Myanmar, Laos, and India. Studying the different kinds of fungi found in different forest types and land-use systems of these countries was an amazing opportunity to really grasp how the distribution ranges of fungi shift across the region, and how diversity changes based on the local environment.

I also realized that to better understand the diversity and use of mushrooms at the regional level, it is important to engage local communities and learn about traditional knowledge systems, and how this knowledge differs across the region. By including research relating to traditional knowledge, we began to appreciate just how much the people of Yunnan know about mushrooms! And, in comparison, how little other communities in other parts of the region know.

Based on the knowledge gaps shown by some communities, and with funding from CAS, my team and I began a training program in some remote villages in Myanmar, teaching local communities how to safely use wild harvested mushrooms, and how to sustainably grow certain species of mushrooms.

This work provided a range of benefits, one of which was additional income and food supply for rural households, and started to give value to the surrounding forests. Communities quickly learned that by conserving the forests, they could generate an income from the forest products, and that healthy forests were more productive than disturbed ones. Thus, in small part, we could contribute towards biodiversity conservation in these remote areas.

So far my team and I have discovered and described more than 1,000 new species of fungi. This is quite an amazing achievement (and I give full credit to my team), as even a single species requires many hours of lab work and manuscript preparation in order to be registered as new, but it also reflects how much is still waiting to be discovered in this region.

Added to that, if you think about it, each of those new species has potential for application. They could contain new chemicals for cancer treatment, or enzymes that can degrade plastics, or anti-pathogenic properties to fight off fungal or bacterial infections; the list goes on and on.

The potential application and benefits for so many new discoveries is enormous and may take decades to be fully documented. We are finding new species each day we study specimens in the lab, so it may be a neverending task ahead of us!

I only work on one small topic within the field of biodiversity science, yet, within that small field I have come to realize just how diverse life in this region is. So when I step back and think about all the other scientists working in this region, and all the other life forms being studied, and the new species being discovered and, perhaps more importantly, awaiting discovery, I am convinced this is the place to be conducting biodiversity science. I think Kunming is the perfect location for such an important meeting as COP 15. COP 15 is a critical meeting; it is a time for intergovernmental bodies to assess the past 10-year plan, noting the successes and shortcomings, and laying out the all-important strategy for the next 10 years, which may prove to be the most crucial 10 years for our planet. We are at a tipping point and it will take a concerted effort from individuals all the way through to governments if we are to bring about a positive, and necessary, change in biodiversity conservation.