GoKawiilFour months later, in November 2025, Van Nuland emailed me the preliminary results. Each of the sampling sites contained, on average, about 75 different species of ectomycorrhizal fungi. The composition of species shifted strongly from north to south. Of the 354 different species the researchers logged, 253 were previously unknown.
The region appears to be a hot spot for rare, endemic fungi. Roughly three of four species they detected have been found nowhere else. Although some may theoretically exist in unsampled tundra — in a place like Siberia, maybe — Van Nuland suspects that many of the species will prove to be endemic to this region. These plants and fungi have been left to co-evolve, alone but together, for millions of years, wedged between mountain and sea as if on a remote island.
“Seeing it on a map is one thing. But being there really drove home just how unique these ecosystems are,” he said. “There were a lot of unnamed species that we found.”
Losing rare fungi could mean losing the unique role they play, and could further destabilize the ecosystem. “People picture protecting the Amazon rainforest,” Van Nuland said. “But for soil, it’s hard. Where are the Amazons of the soil?”
They may be all over the world. Alaska’s North Slope is just one of the dozens of possible fungal hot spots that SPUN researchers plan to visit. The organization works with researchers across 79 countries. Kiers joins four of five trips per year, often with her children. In Kazakhstan, SPUN wants to learn how fungi help grassland plants withstand drought. On the Palmyra Atoll in the central Pacific, trees and their fungal partners infiltrate coral rubble and compete with invasive coconut palms. In Lesotho in southern Africa, fungi seem to help thwart erosion on agricultural land. “Each place that we’ve gone to has a different story,” Van Nuland said. The biodiversity data from each site can feed back into SPUN’s model to improve the hot spot predictions.
Some sites are worth revisiting. In summer 2026, Van Nuland and his team will return to Deadhorse to measure the flux of carbon in and out of the tundra soil. Ecologists don’t know what thawing permafrost will do for Earth’s carbon balance. But as relentless daylight returns each year, new pools of carbon appear within reach of the soil’s most intrepid hyphae. The scientists yearn to know what mycorrhizae will do with it. The fungi will provide answers to those patient enough to listen.