Editorial: The Potential of Fungi for Enhancing Crops and Forestry Systems

In agricultural lands, long-term chemical inputs for the purpose of disease control result in both chronic and acute negative effects, such as environment pollution, human health complications, and spray-resistant pest populations (Aktar et al., 2009). For sustainable agriculture, biotechnological products are developed using targeted fungal species (Bamisile et al., 2021). Members in the genera Alternaria, Aspergillus, Chaetomium, Fusarium, Penicillium, Serendipita, Phoma, and Trichoderma are known as plant growth-promoting fungi, and they have potential to be developed further as biofertilizers (Hyde et al., 2019). In addition, some biofertilizers act as antagonists and suppress incidents of soil-borne plant pathogens while helping in the biocontrol of plant diseases (Pirttilä et al., 2021). Past research has shown that endophytic fungi can be successfully used as plant defenders, growth promoters, and competitors of microbial pathogens, which has potential for utilization in a wide variety of medical, agricultural and industrial fields. This is largely owing to their ubiquitous distribution as symbionts associated with many different plants (Stone et al., 2000; Scannerini et al., 2001; Strobel, 2003; Rania et al., 2016).