Culture selection.

Selection starts from the material.

Lignin and cellulose are the structural polymers that make woody material slow to disappear. Wood-decay fungi are among the few organisms with the enzymatic machinery to dismantle them. What a treatment has to act on therefore sets which cultures are candidates at all.

And from the ground it has to work in.

A fungal mycelium is a branching network of hyphae that grows through soil and dead plant material, following gradients of moisture and food. Site conditions bear directly on which culture can establish: what is already growing there, how wet the ground stays, what the terrain does.

Identity is confirmed before anything scales.

Authenticating a culture means establishing what it actually is, and keeping that identity traceable, before it enters production. Every later step inherits a misidentified culture, so the check belongs here.

One platform, two selection objectives.

For post-fire stabilization the objective concerns soil: hyphae physically enmesh soil particles and organic matter, and contribute compounds that hold those aggregates together. Aggregate structure governs how much rain enters a slope and how much runs across it.

For pre-fire biomass management the objective is the woody material created by fuel-reduction and vegetation-management work, and the aim of accelerating its biological processing.