Sustainable Applications of Mushrooms in Soil Science: A Call for Pictorial and Drawn Articles

Abstract

The world of mushrooms is very exciting and full of with surprises for the reader. Mushrooms are very important macro-organisms for our agroecosystem, because they are edible and medicinal for human health, on one side, and toxic causing the death of humans, on the other side. Several nutritional, medicinal and pharmaceutical applications of mushrooms are well known besides soil improvement. Mushrooms can improve soil through several approaches such as increasing soil organic matter, controlling soil erosion, improving soil aggregates, enhancing soil nutrition, promoting C, and NPK cycling, and the bioremediation of polluted soils. Like other fungi, mushrooms have strong impacts on soil including both positive and negative. The spent mushroom substrate could be applied to soil as an organic fertilizer or compost, which could increase soil microbial activity and the content of amino acid metabolites in the studied orchard. Mushrooms also could be used as a bioindicator for soil pollution (e.g., toxic elements, heavy metals, organic pollutants, and radioactives/isotopes). Therefore, the main roles of mushrooms in the soil include soil myco-nanoremediation, soil myco-nanomanagement, and soil myco-improvement. This is a call for submission of photographic articles on the roles of mushrooms in soils to publish by Egyptian Journal of Soil Science.