The Ecologist Revealing the Invisible Networks That Revive Rainforests
Massive tree-planting programs often lead to unhealthy monocrop plantations. Daisy Dent aims to help forests rebuild themselves.
By Matthew Ponsford | October 12, 2026
Daisy Dent does not plant trees. Instead, the tropical ecologist studies the hidden connections that allow forests to regrow on their own—an approach that could reshape how the world thinks about restoration at a moment when reforestation has never been more urgent.
As of 2026, global tree-planting pledges have surged past 1 trillion trees under initiatives like the Trillion Trees campaign and the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, now in its final years. Yet a growing body of research—much of it led by scientists like Dent—suggests that many of these programs are falling short. All too often, they produce sprawling monocrop plantations that store little carbon, harbor scant biodiversity, and struggle to survive beyond a decade.
Dent, a researcher at ETH Zürich and formerly with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, argues that the future of forest restoration lies not in what humans plant, but in what forests can do for themselves—if we give their invisible networks a chance to work.
The Networks Beneath the Soil
At the heart of Dent's research is a deceptively simple question: What makes a forest a forest? The answer, she has found, lies largely underground and in the air—in the fungal threads that connect roots, in the animals that carry seeds, and in the intricate web of relationships that take centuries to assemble.
Mycorrhizal fungi form symbiotic partnerships with tree roots, extending the reach of those roots by orders of magnitude and exchanging nutrients, water, and even chemical signals between trees. These fungal networks—sometimes called the "wood wide web"—allow forests to share resources, warn one another of pests, and collectively recover from disturbance.
When restoration projects clear land and plant a single fast-growing species, they sever these networks. The result is a plantation, not a forest—a distinction Dent has spent her career making vivid.
Why Natural Regeneration Wins
Dent's work has helped establish natural regeneration as a serious alternative to mass planting. Rather than sowing seedlings by hand, natural regeneration simply removes the barriers—overgrazing, fire, invasive species—that prevent forests from returning on their own. Seeds arrive via wind, birds, and mammals. Fungi recolonize. Complexity builds over time.
Studies Dent has contributed to show that naturally regenerating forests often outperform planted ones on nearly every metric: carbon storage, species richness, resilience to drought, and long-term survival. They are also far cheaper—a critical consideration as restoration budgets tighten and climate finance faces political headwinds in the mid-2020s.
Her findings have begun to influence policy. Several national restoration programs in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa have shifted funding toward assisting natural regeneration rather than planting alone, though the transition remains uneven.
Restoring the Animals That Restore the Forest
One of Dent's most influential insights is that restoring forests means restoring animals. Large-seeded trees—the towering giants that define mature rainforests—depend on toucans, monkeys, tapirs, and other frugivores to disperse their seeds. Where these animals have been hunted out, forests regrow thin and uniform, dominated by small-seeded pioneer species.
This has led Dent and collaborators to argue for "fauna-based restoration": protecting and reintroducing the animals that serve as the forest's gardeners. In a 2024 paper that has shaped subsequent research, her team demonstrated that sites with healthy frugivore populations recovered tree diversity two to three times faster than comparable sites where those animals were absent.
Logging, hunting, and habitat fragmentation often strip a landscape of its animal dispersers long before the trees themselves disappear. Restoration, Dent argues, must therefore begin with the animals—not just the plants.
The Road Ahead
As climate change intensifies droughts and heatwaves across the tropics, the stakes of Dent's work continue to rise. Forests that cannot regenerate on their own will not keep pace with the pressures they face. The species that survive will be those embedded in resilient networks—both ecological and, increasingly, human.
Dent is currently leading a long-term study across fragmented landscapes in Central America, tracking how fungal communities, seed dispersers, and tree recruitment interact across decades. Early results, she says, are hopeful: even badly degraded land can recover much of its former complexity if key species and connections are protected.
The lesson is simple, if counterintuitive: sometimes the best way to restore a forest is to stop trying to build one—and instead let the forest's invisible networks do the work.
Photo: Daisy Dent photographed by Christian Ziegler.