Mycorrhizal network traits

Figures for two 2025 papers in New Phytologist and Mycorrhiza — both focused on how we think about, and measure, the functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi.

The New Phytologist piece (Antunes 2025) reframes mycorrhizal hyphae as fluid-mechanical systems, bringing the physics of flow into a biological context and making abstract engineering concepts visible inside something as intimate as a root–fungal partnership. The Mycorrhiza paper (Antunes et al. 2025) tackles a different problem: the inconsistency in how researchers measure mycorrhizal traits across studies, which limits our ability to predict what these fungi actually do in ecosystems.

Both figures were designed to help researchers from different subfields (ecology, mycology, plant physiology, and soil science) share a common visual vocabulary for ideas that typically live inside separate disciplinary conversations.