Beneath our feet lies a fungal superhighway stretching an estimated 68 quadrillion miles…about 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal networks that partner with ~70% of plant species.
The Society for the Preservation of Underground Networks (SPUN) just released an interactive Mycorrhizal Infrastructure Map, which shows these underground networks move around 4 billion tons of CO₂ equivalent into soils every year (roughly 11% of human emissions) and hold ~300 megatons of carbon, several times the mass of all living humans.
The densest networks show up in wild grasslands like the flooded plains of South Sudan, the Everglades, and the Tibetan plateau, while croplands average about 50% lower network density.
Wild grasslands host ~40% of global AM fungal infrastructure, yet they’re being converted to agriculture four times faster than forests and sit mostly outside protected areas.
#mycorrhizalnetworks #plantintelligence