Warming soils could unleash deadly fungi in Antarctica

warming soils – New research finds that warmer air is linked to more abundant and diverse plant-pathogenic fungi in soils across a 1,900-kilometer stretch from southern Chile to the Antarctic Peninsula. Under medium-high to high greenhouse gas scenarios, those fungi could dou

When Antarctica’s ice retreats, it can look like an open invitation for new life. But in the soils beneath the continent’s mosses and liverworts, warmer conditions could be setting the stage for something far less welcoming: fungi that prey on plants.

Less than 1 percent of Antarctica’s land is ice-free. Even in the relatively wet and mild Antarctic Peninsula—and on nearby islands—plant life has to endure long. harsh seasons. Many Antarctic plants can spend up to eight months covered in snow. Still, some cold-adapted species, including mosses and liverworts, cling to survival.

There’s a widespread assumption that as Antarctica warms and ice recedes. plants will quickly move in. colonizing newly available ground. Kevin Newsham, a soil and plant ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, based in Cambridge, England, challenges that idea. “In reality, it won’t be like this. The plants aren’t going to have it strictly easy.”.

Newsham and colleagues focused on a factor that is easy to overlook in a place defined by ice: soil-borne disease. Plant-disease fungi exist worldwide, but little has been known about what threat they might pose to Antarctica’s plants. To find out. the team collected and analyzed fungal DNA in more than 50 soil samples across a 1. 900-kilometer swath that ran from southern Chile through Antarctic islands and along the Antarctic Peninsula.

They didn’t just measure fungi in the ground. They also examined how each site’s climate tracked with fungal abundance and diversity. The relationship that emerged was blunt in its simplicity: the warmer the climate. the more pathogenic fungi were present—both in number and in variety. Under medium-high to high future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios. the researchers project that those numbers could double by the end of the century.

The southernmost soils in the study, on islands along the Antarctic Peninsula, had relatively few pathogenic fungi. Doubling there, Newsham’s team says, might not translate into a dramatic jump in absolute counts. But the risk isn’t only about totals. Even one new fungal species could devastate Antarctica’s unprepared plant communities, Newsham warns. “A single species of pathogens. introduced to an environment where plants don’t see pathogens often. can have disproportionately large effects.”.

That kind of disproportion isn’t hypothetical. Similar impacts have struck plant communities in other regions before—chestnut blight in North America, Dutch elm disease in Europe, and root-infecting pathogens that decimated Eucalyptus forests in Australia.

Put together, the study turns a familiar warming story on its head. Antarctica’s plants may eventually gain more space on paper. but warmer soils could also amplify the disease pressures already hidden in the earth—pressing a fragile ecosystem that has spent millennia operating with fewer plant diseases into a world where pathogenic fungi spread more readily.

Antarctica Antarctic Peninsula warming soils fungal DNA plant pathogens mosses liverworts Global Change Biology greenhouse gas emissions disease ecology