Re-examining the 'wood-wide web'

In an exclusive Bay Area presentation, meet the driving force behind a re-examination of the 'wood-wide web', who, along with Dr. Melanie Jones and Dr. Jason Hoeksema, is challenging data and media inflation of claims about Common Mycorrhizal Networks.

Few ecological concepts have affected academic and public discourse as much as the ‘wood-wide web’. This concept holds that all trees in a forest are physically connected belowground by mycorrhizal fungi, with the fungi serving as passive conduits for the flow of resources and signals among the networked trees. Through these fungal networks, ‘Mother trees’ recognize and warn their kin of danger, and, in one final act of altruism, dying trees send pulses of resources to neighbors. Though widely appealing and massively popular, is any of this true? In this seminar, I will separate fact from fiction regarding the ‘wood-wide web’.

Dr. Justine Karst is an Associate Professor at the University of Alberta. She studies the mycorrhizal ecology of boreal forests.