Mycology
The researchers and writers who moved fungi from the decomposition footnote to the thing the rest of the system is built on.
Notes
Fungi were treated for most of a century as what happens after the interesting biology is over. Three decades of work has reversed that: mycorrhizal association is now understood as the normal condition of a plant root rather than an extra, and the fungal partner is doing a large share of the nutrient acquisition.
The records here cover the research, the popular translation, and the commercial application, which are genuinely different jobs.
One caution belongs on this page. The most-cited claim in the field — that trees exchange resources and signals through shared fungal networks in the way popular accounts describe — is under active scientific dispute, and the researchers named here have engaged with that dispute in the literature rather than around it. Where a record touches it, it says so.