Dr Gabriel Hemery donned his full waterproofs earlier this week to get stuck in to some fungal fieldwork with Sylva Scholar Kirsty Monk in Wytham woods. This was part of an experiment to study the distributions of cord-forming fungi at 20m and 2.5m scales. Results of this experiment will help uncover some of the factors responsible for determining which fungi are found where, and whether at small scales, woodlands tend to be dominated by one species or not. However, the fieldwork is only the tip of the iceberg as now the 100+ samples will be taken back to the lab to be cleaned and processed to find out, from their DNA, what species they are.
Sylva Scholar Kirsty Monk conducting fieldwork mapping fungal cords at Wytham Woods. Here the white thread of a cord-forming fungi is being tracked and samples taken for later DNA analysis.
