Preparing for the worst: Utilizing stress‐tolerant soil microbial communities to aid ecological restoration in the Anthropocene

1. Multiple drivers of environmental change pose a significant challenge for ecological restoration, including climate change, soil salinization and environmental pollution. Due to the important role that soil biota play in enabling plants to cope with a variety of abiotic stressors, there is growing interest in the use of microbial inoculations to facilitate native plant restoration in the face of such change. 2. Recently, novel methods have begun being explored in agriculture to harness stress-conditioned soil biota for improving abiotic stress tolerance in crop species. Similar applications in ecological restoration – where plants are inoculated with indigenous soil microbial communities that are preconditioned to various abiotic stressors – could potentially increase our capacity to restore degraded ecosystems under global change. 3. In this paper, we aim to (1) outline the ways in which soil microbial communities might be conditioned in order to confer greater stress tolerance to plants that are targets for restoration; (2) highlight successful (and unsuccessful) examples where stress-tolerant soil microbial communities were utilized to improve plant performance; (3) describe the ways in which stress-conditioned soil biota could be deployed in order to assist ecological restoration; and (4) discuss the potential risks and outstanding questions associated with such an approach. 4. If restoration practitioners are able to harness the soil microbiome to improve plant stress tolerance as is currently being explored in agriculture, this could revolutionize methods for the restoration of degraded lands in the Anthropocene

Techniques for Host Plant Inoculation with Truffles and Other Edible Ectomycorrhizal MushroomsEdible Ectomycorrhizal Mushrooms

Large-scale production of high-quality mycorrhizal plants in the greenhouse is mainstay for the modern cultivation of edible ectomycorrhizal mushrooms (EEMMs). Success at this step not only depends on the reliability of the fungal inoculum used for plantlet mycorrhization but also on the environmental conditions attending symbiosis establishment. Methods developed 40-50 years ago for inoculating host plants with EEMMs are still largely used today, with slight modifications. Mycelial inoculations are used commercially only for some edible ectomycorrhizal (EEM) basidiomycetes, while inoculation with spores is the most common method for producing seedlings colonized with truffle mycorrhizas. However pure cultures and ectomycorrhizas of Tuber have also been used to obtain mycorrhizal plants mainly for scientific purposes. Mycelium-based inoculum offers many advantages, such as lower contamination risks, more reliable root colonization, and provides opportunities for genetic selection of EEMM strains. Long time preservation of EEM cultures and the creation of germplasm banks would be an important step to support mycelium-based technologies. To this aim, we demonstrate successful crypreservation of strains of Tuber borchii and Tuber aestivum. Recent advances in genetic and biotechnology of EEMs and their hosts has the potential to transform the current EEMM nursery trade