wood wide web

See also: Wood Wide Web

English

Alternative forms

• wood-wide web

Etymology

Blend of wood +‎ World Wide Web

Noun

wood wide web (plural wood wide webs)

1. (ecology) A mycorrhizal network; a network of fungal hyphae that connect the plants in a region.
   • 2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 184:

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

   • 2022, Maria Failla, Growing Joy:

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

     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'.