Previous ecologists had focused on what happens aboveground, but Simard used radioactive isotopes of carbon to trace how trees share resources and information with one another through an intricately interconnected network of mycorrhizal fungi that colonize trees’ roots. What captured the public’s imagination was Simard’s findings that trees are social beings that exchange nutrients, help one another and communicate about insect pests and other environmental threats. And her research was prominently featured in German forester Peter Wohlleben’s 2016 nonfiction bestseller The Hidden Life of Trees. Simard’s work also inspired James Cameron's vision of the godlike “Tree of Souls” in his 2009 box office hit Avatar. The University of British Columbia ecologist was the model for Patricia Westerford, a controversial tree scientist in Richard Powers’s 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Overstor y. Few researchers have had the pop culture impact of Suzanne Simard.
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