“The biggest finding that we had was that truffles were responding to these hot and dry summers,” says Steidinger. He and colleagues found that a temperature anomaly of just 3 degrees Celsius was enough to stop the production of truffle fruiting bodies altogether. As tree-growing seasons shortened, truffles also tended to get smaller.
Sasha Dorey, in Dorset, uses her two Lagotto Romagnolo dogs to search for truffles in a friend’s orchard. Her experience chimes with Waddingham’s: “I’ve been working with truffles for 15 years, but I’ve only really noticed a difference to the way they’re growing this year.” “What appear to be single resilient species are actually mosaics of vulnerable populations,” says Steidinger. Notably, the main truffle-producing countries that most culinary aficionados think of—Spain, France, and Italy—are in the central part of the truffles’ range. So even in the old bastions of truffle production, climate change could take a toll, rather than just at the far-flung edges where you might expect temperature changes to be more dramatic.
He praises the researchers’ methods and notes how this year’s elevated temperatures in Europe are already inflating truffle prices: “The summer truffle, it’s been trading for like €1,000 a kilo. It’s way in excess of what it is in a normal year.”
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