Looking belowground can tell us how forest trees will react to environmental changes

New research by Michela Audisio, PhD candidate at Göttingen University, Germany. There is much more to trees than we see aboveground, and their interactions with fungi belowground are vital for their survival. Trees rely on the symbiotic interaction with specialized soil fungi to take up important resources such as nutrients and water. In exchange for …

The journey belowground: Gardens, nurseries, and beyond

A commentary by Noel Kingsbury including his work with Úna Sherer (pictured). Gardeners always seem to accept the importance of roots, but in a way that is entirely rhetorical and never followed up with any real desire to investigate. Modern nursery production containerises almost everything, thus the consumer will never see anything anyway, just the …

Why go belowground?

A commentary by F. Curtis Lubbe at the Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The belowground lives of plants are very different than those we see above the soil. As aboveground, in the soil plants grow, branch, forage, compete, and have complex multualistic relationships. However, all of these processes are a bit …