26 October 2026, Adelaide: A six-year study from Flinders University has found that restoring farmland and other degraded sites to native vegetation does not automatically bring the soil’s fungal communities back to a healthy state at the same pace, a finding with direct relevance for the growing number of land restoration, regenerative agriculture and carbon-credit programmes that assume soil health follows once plants return.
The research, led by Professor Martin Breed of Flinders University’s Restoration Ecology group and published in the journal Molecular Ecology, tracked soil fungal communities at native revegetation sites by resampling the same plots repeatedly over six years, a method known as longitudinal resampling. Co-authors included Carl D. Watson, Alfie J. Lem and Craig Liddicoat of Flinders University, along with Andrew Bissett of Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, based in Hobart. The paper, titled “Restoration plantings promote functional recovery of soil fungi,” found that different aspects of the soil fungal community recover at noticeably different rates.
Function Recovers Faster Than Composition
Specifically, the researchers found that the functional recovery of soil fungi, meaning the jobs those fungi perform, such as cycling nutrients and breaking down organic matter, continued to improve steadily over the full six years of the study. The broader fungal community itself, meaning the actual mix of species present, showed comparatively little additional recovery over the same period. In other words, the soil was doing more of the right kind of biological work as time went on, even though the underlying community of organisms doing that work had not shifted much toward what would be found in an undisturbed native site. Professor Breed said the team’s “longitudinal resampling study identified changes consistent with continued functional recovery over six years.” The researchers suggested that the land’s prior use as farmland, and elevated soil nutrient levels left behind from past fertiliser application, may act as a lasting barrier to the fungal community fully recovering, even once native vegetation has been reestablished on the surface.
The practical message, according to the study, is that above-ground vegetation gains, the kind most easily measured and reported in a restoration project, do not guarantee that the wider soil ecosystem has recovered to match. That distinction matters increasingly to a wide range of land managers. Government and corporate revegetation schemes, biodiversity offset programmes, and voluntary carbon projects that convert former cropland or pasture back to native habitat routinely use plant cover and tree survival as their main success metrics, yet this study suggests that soil biology, which underpins long-term soil fertility, carbon storage and resilience, may lag well behind what the visible vegetation suggests, particularly on land with a long history of agricultural fertiliser use.
Global Agriculture is an independent international media platform covering agri-business, policy, technology, and sustainability. For editorial collaborations, thought leadership, and strategic communications, write to pr@global-agriculture.com
