Susan Simard

Susan Simard… now a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia, Simard, has studied webs of root and fungi in the Arctic, temperate and coastal forests of North America for nearly three decades. Her initial inklings about the importance of mycorrhizal networks were prescient, inspiring whole new lines of research that ultimately overturned longstanding misconceptions about forest ecosystems. By analyzing the DNA in root tips and tracing the movement of molecules through underground conduits, Simard has discovered that fungal threads link nearly every tree in a forest — even trees of different species. Carbon, water, nutrients, alarm signals and hormones can pass from tree to tree through these subterranean circuits. …Chemical alarm signals generated by one tree prepare nearby trees for danger. …In a TED Talk Simard gave in 2016,she describes “a world of infinite biological pathways,” species that are “interdependent like yin and yang.”