# Antarctic plants may face a growing fungal threat from warming soils

- Link: https://www.tehranianonline.com/antarctic-plants-may-face-a-growing-fungal-threat-from-warming-soils/
- Published: 2026-02-09T12:51:19+03:30
- Author: Farid Ghoreyshi

Global warming will expand the tiny Antarctic plant community. But it could also
foster pathogenic fungi in soils that might kill those plants.

Analyses of soil samples from southern Chile to the Antarctic Peninsula reveal that
fungi that prey on plants [grow more abundant and diverse with higher air temperature](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.70885),
researchers report in the May _Global Change Biology_. By 2100, the team says, projected
warming could double the occurrence of those fungi in some coastal Antarctic soils.

Less than 1 percent of Antarctica’s land is ice-free. Even the relatively wet, mild
Antarctic Peninsula and nearby islands are forbidding to plant life, which can spend
up to eight months covered in snow. But some cold-adapted plants, such as mosses
and liverworts, cling to life. 

There’s often an assumption that [as Antarctica’s ice recedes due to warming temperatures](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/irreversible-climate-antarctica),
the continent’s plants will happily colonize the newly available land, says Kevin
Newsham, a soil and plant ecologist with the British Antarctic Survey, based in 
Cambridge, England. But “in reality, it won’t be like this. The plants aren’t going
to have it strictly easy.”

Fungi [that cause plant disease](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nano-tech-nutrients-protect-plants-fungus-disease-food-agriculture)
lurk in soils worldwide, though little has been known about the threat they pose
to Antarctica’s plants. So Newsham and his colleagues collected and analyzed fungal
DNA in over 50 samples of soils along a 1,900-kilometer swath through southern Chile,
Antarctic islands and the Antarctic Peninsula.

The researchers also analyzed how each site’s climate correlated to fungal abundance
and diversity. What they found was startlingly simple: The warmer the climate, the
more pathogenic fungi were present, in both number and variety. Under medium high
to high future greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, those numbers could double by
the end of the century.

The southernmost soils the team analyzed, on islands along the Antarctic Peninsula,
had relatively few pathogenic fungi. Doubling, therefore, might not mean a huge 
jump in absolute numbers. But even one new species of fungus could devastate Antarctica’s
unprepared plant life, Newsham says. “A single species of pathogens, introduced 
to an environment where plants don’t see pathogens often, can have disproportionately
large effects.”

Such effects have hit temperate plant communities before, from chestnut blight in
North America to [Dutch elm disease in Europe](https://www.sciencenews.org/article/dutch-elm-fungus-turns-tree-lure)
to root-infecting pathogens decimating Eucalyptus forests in Australia.