Citation needed! The Aspen page on Wikipedia doesn't mention fungi at all.
>Weighing 13 million pounds, Pando is the world’s largest organism by mass (Oregon’s “humungous fungus” spans a greater distance). Quaking aspens can reproduce by disseminating seeds, but more frequently, they send up sprouts from their roots and form a mass of trees aptly known as a “clone.”
and I was able to find
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/strange-but-true-...
Quaking Aspens were my Spirit Tree and I loved being around them.
I didnt know at the time that the groves of Aspen were acually all the same tree.
But they had a profound effect on me as I hiked and built stuff from them.
I used to chop them down and build tee-pees with pine bows as walls... I was like 13 or so. If you got caught in any of my booby-traps, I am sorry...
I read the page you kindly linked but I'm not seeing anything about Aspens being considered a fungus with tree-like fruiting bodies..
But they exist in a large underground network of roots, and spawn trunks upwards over that large area, not unlike how many funguses do. Convergent evolution of an approach to life.
I'm definitely a layman here, but I lived in Utah about 10 years ago and did some reading on Aspens, which is when I came across that comparison. I was hoping to find a direct citation to post here but haven't managed to do so yet.
A fire (or clear cut) can take down the entire overstory of trees, but that living root system will survive & send up more "suckers" that become new trees. It's this "the real life is underground" vibe that makes them particularly fungi-like to me. I wonder if any other trees are like Aspens in this regard...