Recent investigations in western Amazonia have revealed vast peatlands, up to 8m thick in places. Because they are so remote, we know little about them compared to peatlands in the northern hemisphere. Tom Kelly and Freddie Draper explain how their work will help us understand these ecosystems and revel how big they really are.

This week in the Planet Earth podcast, Karl Ritz and Robert Simmons of Cranfield University, and Guy Thallon from fresh produce company Produce World, talk about how they manage one of the most crucial ingredients needed to grow vegetables - soil.

Fungi are all around. Mostly you don't see them, but under the microscope earth from almost anywhere in the world contains a tangle of branching, interwoven fungal filaments called mycelia. Tom Marshall explains how NERC-funded soil science will help feed our hungry planet over the next century.

The potential of the peatlands of southern South America as sources of information about past climates has been neglected compared to those of the Northern Hemisphere. Scientists have been tramping through the bogs of Tierra del Fuego in an effort to redress the balance.

The carbon in soils and vegetation needs careful management if it's to stay put. But what does this mean on the ground? Tom Marshall talked to those responsible for the Lake District's landscape to find out.

This week in the Planet Earth podcast, Bethan Purse from NERC's Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, and Matt Elliott and Colin Edwards from the Forestry Commission, talk about a new map that could help control the spread of sudden oak death, a disease that threatens trees and plants like oak, beech, larch and bilberry.

Plants use underground fungal networks to warn their neighbours of aphid attack, UK scientists have discovered.

Allowing farmland that's been reclaimed from the sea to flood and turn back into salt marsh could make it absorb lots of carbon from the atmosphere, a new study suggests, though the transformation will take many years to complete.