Dr. César Marín
Oriana Mora Rodriguez
Faviola Gonzalez
Francisco Mondaca
Dr. Adriana Corrales
Dr. Daniela Soto-Hernandez
Consejo de Pueblos Atacameños
Mateo Barrenengoa & Diego Fuentes
This desert gets the least precipitation of any on Earth, but that doesn’t mean it’s a barren land. Springing from its soils are many extremophilic plants that thrive in harsh conditions, and people who care for the land, protect it, and live off what it provides.
The SPUN team started in San Pedro de Atacama, where we were joined by longtime collaborator Dr. César Marín, a soil and mycorrhizal ecologist at Universidad Santo Tomás de Chile. Together, we went to Socaire to give a community workshop about mycorrhizal fungi and climate change to the CPA’s environmental unit and other community members. The presentations culminated with a soil sampling demonstration, in which SPUN shared protocols and methods for sampling mycorrhizal fungi.
The group then traveled to the “fruit forests” of Toconao. Here, bright green trees appear like oases in the desert. Large chañar trees are interspersed with apricot, pear, and quince trees, yielding fruit that has made the region famous. These forests use community-managed, traditional flooding irrigation, in which a series of canals, some of which are nearly 1000 years old, are flooded every few weeks, providing an infusion of water to the trees.
In these ecosystems, cachiyuyo comes along early in stages of ecological succession and is often one of the first plants to grow after an environmental disturbance. This makes knowing its mycorrhizal partners a crucial piece in understanding how these desert ecosystems thrive.
Above the Salar and the fruit forests lies one of the most iconic ecosystems of the Andes, the South American Puna. Samples were collected as high as 4500 meters elevation, and the team joined the traditional indigenous practice of chewing coca leaves to stave off altitude sickness. The researchers carefully lifted puffy cushion plants from the ground and sampled the carbon-packed dark black soil underneath. The area is rich in sulfur and other minerals, and the soil had a strong, metallic smell.
Thanks to our partnership with the CPA, SPUN is able to understand the Atacama Desert, and the process of sampling in areas with high aridity, differently. Equally, through a continued partnership with the CPA, we will be able to provide our collaborators with information about which mycorrhizal fungi support their crops. We hope to identify new species that are specially adapted to live in these high-altitude drylands and soils with high salt and sulfur content.
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