Merlin Sheldrake

For more than 400 million years, mycorrhizal fungi and plants have formed partnerships that are crucial to the emergence and functioning of global ecosystems. The importance of these symbiotic fungi for plant nutrition is well established. However, the role of mycorrhizal fungi in transporting carbon into soil systems on a global scale remains unde...

The ancestors of plants could not have moved from the water onto the land some 500 million years ago without striking up a relationship with fungi. Today, nearly all plants depend on the symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi that live in their roots. Some plants have become fully dependent on their fungal partners, and have lost the ability to photosynthesis...

This story is about the twentieth-century ethnobotanist, Richard Evans Schultes (1915-2001), and his research on hallucinogenic plants. Ethnobotany can contribute directly to science and technology studies in that the discipline makes cultural ways of knowing its scientific subject. Ethnobotanists must learn about plants through people, and are not...

Improved understanding of the nutritional ecology of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is important in understanding how tropical forests maintain high productivity on low-fertility soils. Relatively little is known about how AM fungi will respond to changes in nutrient inputs in tropical forests, which hampers our ability to assess how forest prod...

We present a meta-analysis of plant responses to fertilization experiments conducted in lowland, species-rich, tropical forests. We also update a key result and present the first species-level analyses of tree growth rates for a 15-year factorial nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K) experiment conducted in central Panama. The update conce...

The standing wave patterns formed on the surface of a vertically oscillated fluid enclosed by a container have long been a subject of fascination, and are known as Faraday waves. In circular containers, stable, radially symmetrical Faraday wave-patterns are resonant phenomena, and occur at the vibrational modes where whole numbers of waves fit exac...

Dissimilarity overlap curve analysis has shown that 'universality' is a common feature in many complex microbial communities, suggesting that the same taxa interact in a similar manner when shared between communities. We present evidence that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, common plant root symbionts, show universal community compositions in natural...

The majority of terrestrial plants associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which typically facilitate the uptake of limiting mineral nutrients by plants in exchange for plant carbon. However, hundreds of non-photosynthetic plant species—mycoheterotrophs—depend entirely on AM fungi for carbon as well as mineral nutrition. Mycoheterotrophs...

The majority of terrestrial plants associate with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi, which typically facilitate the uptake of limiting mineral nutrients by plants in exchange for plant carbon. However, hundreds of non-photosynthetic plant species—mycoheterotrophs—depend entirely on AM fungi for carbon as well as mineral nutrition. Mycoheterotrophs...

Tropical forest productivity is sustained by the cycling of nutrients through decomposing organic matter. Arbuscular mycorrhizal ( AM ) fungi play a key role in the nutrition of tropical trees, yet there has been little experimental investigation into the role of AM fungi in nutrient cycling via decomposing organic material in tropical forests. We...

Increasing atmospheric CO2 and temperature may increase forest productivity, including litterfall, but the consequences for soil organic matter remain poorly understood. To address this, we measured soil carbon and nutrient concentrations at nine depths to 2 m after 6 years of continuous litter removal and litter addition in a semi-evergreen rain f...

Increasing atmospheric CO2 and temperature may increase forest productivity, including litterfall, but the consequences for soil organic matter remain poorly understood. To address this, we measured soil carbon and nutrient concentrations at nine depths to 2 m after six years of continuous litter removal and litter addition in a semi-evergreen rain...

Albert Howard worked as an imperial agronomist for the British Government in India. Following his retirement in 1931, he returned to England and embarked on a passionate global campaign to reform agricultural practices. Central to Howard's project was the mycorrhizal association, a symbiotic relationship between plant roots and subterranean fungi,...