Toby Kiers awarded Tyler Prize for decades of mycorrhizal fungi research

On Tuesday the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement was awarded to Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist at Vrije University Amsterdam who has spent the past three decades studying mycorrhizal fungi and the soil networks they form. Kiers, who last year also won a MacArthur fellowship and shared the Climate Breakthrough Award with Giuliana Furci and Merlin Sheldrake, studies microbes that draw carbon from plant roots and trade it for nutrients.

Her team has estimated that mycorrhizal filaments, laid end to end, would span “half the galaxy” and that they sequester 13 billion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide — about one-third of the world’s fossil-fuel emissions — in soil each year. Her work has shown these fungi can behave strategically in resource exchange, and in 2021 she founded the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN); last year SPUN unveiled the first global underground atlas and helped develop an Underground Advocates initiative to train scientists in legal and policy skills.

SPUN’s Underground Explorers Program has given 137 grants across 58 countries, 80 percent to researchers in the global south and more than half led by women, supporting projects from Mongolia to Nigeria and Mexico. Kiers describes the approach as “punk science,” a decentralized community that maps and protects fungal diversity.

Key Topics

Science, Toby Kiers, Mycorrhizal Fungi, Tyler Prize, Spun, Vrije University Amsterdam