Different nutrients were added into the solid fermentation of woody biomass, Populus tomentosa, to improve pretreatment by a white rot fungus, Trametes velutina. Fungal pretreatment supplemented with trace elements resulted in large amount of lignin loss but low degradation of carbohydrate. Only 12.6 % of Klason lignin was left in the residues pretreated by T. velutina for 8 weeks supplemented with 1 % trace elements (TE group). When fungal-pretreated residues were subjected to enzymatic hydrolysis for 96 h, a maximum reducing sugar yield of 44 % was obtained from the TE group at the 8th week, 2.3 times higher than that of untreated samples. In addition, the highest ethanol yield of 22 % was observed by the fermentation of 8-week pretreated residues from the basic medium plus trace element group, which was five times more than that of untreated samples.