In and around the tangled roots of the forest floor, fungi and bacteria grow with trees, exchanging nutrients for carbon in a vast, global marketplace.

Mapping these relationships could help scientists understand how symbiotic partnerships structure the world’s forests and how a warming climate could affect them.

A team of over 200 scientists to generate these maps, which revealed a new biological rule, which the team named Read’s Rule after pioneer in symbiosis research Sir David Read.

In one example of how they could apply this research, the researchers used their map to predict how symbioses might change by 2070 if carbon emissions continue unabated. This scenario resulted in a 10 percent reduction in the biomass of tree species that associate with a type of fungi found primarily in cooler regions.

Read the full article about mapping symbiosis in forests by Taylor Kubota at Futurity.