Delivering food from forests: integrating understanding across trees, fungi and soils to raise speciality crops in forest plantations

The current emphasis om expanding woodland cover in the UK has the potential to create significant conflict with food production systems. Agroforestry, in which food production is combined with timber crops, has the potential to reconcile food production and forestry yet a poor understanding of high yielding and economically attractive production systems restricts its practice in the UK. Many tree species grown in the UK form a mutualist association (mycorrhizae) with fungi that produce edible fruiting bodies, providing great potential for incorporation into agroforestry systems.