British Ecological Society Journals

Katie Field, Associate Editor for Functional Ecology, talks to Ken Thompson about her new Virtual Issue: Mycorrhizal networks in ecosystem structure and functioning. The vast majority of land plants form mutualistic symbioses with soil-dwelling fungi known as mycorrhizas, which can link many plants in a common mycelial network. These networks can be enormous, with around 200m of mycorrhizal fungal hyphae present in a single gram of typical forest soil. The flow of nutrients between plants and mycorrhiza and the resulting redistribution of nutrients throughout a community is an area of much recent research with important contributions having been made by publications in Functional Ecology.