Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers – Mapping, Protecting and Harnessing the Mycorrhizal Networks that Sustain Life on Earth
Bioneers | Published: April 4, 2024 Restoring Ecosystems Video
In this session, two leading researchers seeking to understand the critically important but long overlooked and understudied role of fungal networks in supporting life and regulating climate will discuss their work with the groundbreaking, visionary Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), an organization at the forefront of studying and protecting fungal networks all over the world and driving innovation in underground climate and biodiversity science.
With: biologist Merlin Sheldrake, Ph.D., author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make our World; and Toby Kiers, Ph.D., Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Executive Director and Chief Scientist at SPUN. Moderated by J.P. Harpignies, senior producer, Bioneers Conference.
This talk was delivered at the 2024 Bioneers Conference.
Merlin Sheldrake, Ph.D., a biologist and writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science, received his doctorate in tropical ecology from Cambridge for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. He is currently a research associate of the Vrije University Amsterdam, works with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), and sits on the advisory board of the Fungi Foundation. Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. He is also a keen brewer and fermenter fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms, and a musician.
Toby Kiers, Ph.D., is the Executive Director and Chief Scientist of SPUN (the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks) and a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at VU, Amsterdam, where she runs a lab studying flows and structures in plant-fungal networks. Globally-recognized for her scientific work and named by the UN as one of the 22 scientists making a difference in biodiversity research and an ‘Innovator to Watch’ by Smithsonian Magazine, Toby has won numerous prestigious awards, including a SPINOZA prize (known as the ‘Dutch Nobel’) and an E.O. Wilson Award for Natural History.
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