Common mycorrhizal network

An underground network of fungal hyphae that connects the roots of multiple plants, moving carbon, water, nutrients and chemical signals among them.

Mycorrhiza: Symbiosis between fungi and plant roots in which the fungus trades soil resources for plant carbon. A common network is the connected form of this root-fungus symbiosis; the partnership is its foundation.
David Read: British mycorrhizal ecologist who argued in the 1980s and 1990s that fungal hyphal connections matter in forests. Read's isotope work on ectomycorrhizal carbon flows laid the groundwork for the network concept.
Resource transfer skepticism: Position held by mycorrhizal researchers that interplant carbon and nutrient transfer is trivial, mostly fungal, and not mutualistic. Critics argue tracer carbon mostly enters fungal tissue, not the recipient plant's carbon budget.
Birch–fir carbon transfer experiment: Simard's 1997 field experiment tracing labeled carbon between paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings. The canonical experiment behind the network concept, showing bidirectional isotope movement between species.
Retention forestry: Logging approach leaving living trees and structure on harvested sites to preserve ecosystem functions. Network claims are used to argue that leaving mother trees sustains regeneration through fungal links.
Arbuscular mycorrhiza: Mycorrhiza of Glomeromycete fungi that penetrate root cells, forming arbuscules; dominant in most herbaceous plants. One of the two fungal types that form shared networks, linking plants through anastomosed hyphal strands.
Suzanne Simard: Canadian forest ecologist whose isotope-tracing experiments in Douglas fir forests popularized plant-to-plant transfer. Simard's 1997 paper provided the headline evidence that carbon moves between trees through fungi.
Kin selection in plants: Evolutionary prediction that plants favor kin; networks allegedly helping seedlings conflicts with competition expectations. Networks feeding unrelated competitors raises evolutionary problems skeptics say the evidence cannot answer.
Douglas fir forests: Pacific conifer forests with thick ectomycorrhizal fungal mats and Rhizopogon networks around fir roots. The ecosystem where nearly all famous common-mycorrhizal-network studies were performed.
Mother tree hypothesis: Claim that large old trees preferentially nourish kin seedlings through mycorrhizal networks. The best-known popular extension of network research, and the claim most strongly challenged by critics.

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