Interesting. Seems like the authors main contention is with the popularization of the concept that trees might be cooperating with each other instead of hyper competing as we historicallly assume via just natural selection pressures.

I’m sympathetic to their argument that we need to be careful how far we take the cooperation argument but I think they’re also throwing out the baby with the bath water. These authors are highly focused on showing the validity of the opposite point of view and so have conducted a meta analysis of the literature that is very, I would say, biased towards the exclusion of studies that show communication and transfers of chemicals between trees using mycorrhizal networks. I still find their meta analysis interesting but would caution people to also take their cutting down of the idea of transfers between plants using mycorrhizal networks with large grains of salt. They, as researchers, are also incentivized to kind of go a bit too far the other way from what they were arguing against (transfers between plants using mycorrhizal networks)