wood wide web

plural wood wide webs · alternative wood-wide web

1. biologyA mycorrhizal network; a network of fungal hyphae that connect the plants in a region.

   Precisely what is passing between plants through fungal networks is a thorny question for all researches investigating wood wide webs.

   2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 184

   2 more examples

   In the forest, there is a “wood wide web” of mycorrhizal fungi that run underground, connecting the trees in a forest, helping them grow and communicate.

   2022, Maria Failla, Growing Joy

   The portrayal of fungi-forest symbioses as a 'wood wide web' is in itself a technological image which, as Woods analyses in his contribution to this volume, often hides the mycelium behind the tree: he agrees in this with Jedediah Purdy, who has satirized the inevitability with which, 'after centuries of viewing forests as kingdoms, then as factories (and, along the way, as cathedrals for Romantic sentiment), the 21st century would discover a networked information system under the leaves and humus'.

   2022, Liliane Campos, Pierre-Louis Patoine, Life, Re-Scaled

1. biologyMycorrhizal networks, that is networks of fungi that connect trees, collectively.

   If so, did Voyria have anything to give back to their fungal partners in exchange, or were they just parasites — hackers of the Wood Wide Web?

   2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 23