Announcing the SPUNxMOTH Underground Advocates Program
NYU MOTH Partners with SPUN to Launch Underground Advocates Program
January 15, 2026 – New York, NY – The MOTH Program is thrilled to announce a new collaboration with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN): the Underground Advocates Program, an initiative that will equip mycorrhizal fungi researchers worldwide with the legal and advocacy tools to translate their science into real-world protection and policy change.
Since launching in 2022, SPUN’s Underground Explorers Program has built a decentralized global network of researchers mapping Earth’s mycorrhizal fungal biodiversity. With 137 grants across 58 countries—81% to Global South researchers and over half led by women—the program embodies locally led, community-driven science. Now these researchers are ready to become advocates.
How MOTH Contributes
MOTH brings core expertise: translating scientific insights into effective legal frameworks and actionable policy. We’ve spent years developing practical approaches that bridge Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to advance legal protections for more-than-human life. The MOTH Academy has already trained over 120 scientists, community leaders, and activists through our annual courses and new fellowship program.
As part of the Underground Advocates Program, MOTH is creating specialized training modules that teach environmental law fundamentals, policy research tools, and strategic advocacy design to underground explorers. Underground Advocates will learn to navigate diverse legal contexts—from biodiversity and climate law to rights of nature frameworks—and develop advocacy skills to amplify their work locally and globally.
Why This Matters
As DNA sequencing and machine learning make fungal datasets more accessible, and as biodiversity and rights of nature laws advance worldwide, there arise unprecedented opportunities to mobilize scientific knowledge for conservation, restoration, climate action, and land rights. The Underground Advocates Program offers a proof-of-concept for environmental protection that is locally led, scientifically grounded, and globally connected.
This partnership deepens the MOTH Program’s commitment to interdisciplinary collaboration and relationship-based approaches to legal transformation, ensuring that scientific advances and policy victories produce real change on—and in—the ground.
About SPUN
The Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) was founded in November 2021 as a non-profit scientific research organization with a mission to map and preserve Earth’s fungal networks. In collaboration with researchers and local communities, SPUN is accelerating efforts to protect the underground ecosystems largely absent from conservation and climate agendas. To learn more about SPUN, visit: https://spun.earth/.
About the MOTH Program
The MOTH (More-Than-Human Life) Program, based at NYU School of Law, is an interdisciplinary initiative advancing the rights and well-being for humans, nonhumans, and the web of life that sustains us all. The Program brings together legal scholars, scientists, Indigenous leaders, journalists, artists, and other thinkers and doers from across the world. To learn more, visit the MOTH website at www.mothlife.org.
For more information or press inquiries, please contact:
Emma Crowe
NYU MOTH Program
