Making hollow trees: inoculating living trees with wood-decay fungi for the conservation of threatened taxa - a guide for conservationists

Wainhouse, Matt and Boddy, Lynne ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1845-6738 2022. Making hollow trees: inoculating living trees with wood-decay fungi for the conservation of threatened taxa - a guide for conservationists. Global Ecology and Conservation 33 , e01967. 10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01967

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Abstract

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 of woodland with a depleted stock of veteran trees that support these microhabitats. Decomposition is a slow process and it may take heart-rot fungi hundreds of years to establish before hollowing even begins. A major challenge to forest restoration, therefore, is how these habitats can be restored or replicated. One approach is to inoculate trees with heart-rot fungi as a direct intervention to accelerate tree hollowing. We identify two types of conservation inoculation that could be beneficial in forest conservation: (1) Veteranising inoculations designed to benefit cavity and decay dependant fauna; and (2) Translocation inoculations, to reintroduce locally extinct, dispersal-limited heart-rot fungi. Tree inoculations have a hundred-year pedigree but successes have been mixed and there are no long-term published studies. Reflecting on previous heart-rot inoculations we discuss elements of the inoculation protocol to aid design of conservation inoculations. Conservation inoculations have the potential to be a useful tool in forest restoration and we hope to stimulate wider uptake as a direct method for conservation.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Biosciences
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	2351-9894
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	25 January 2022
Date of Acceptance:	12 December 2021
Last Modified:	28 May 2024 18:37
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/146873

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