When do plants help or hinder each other?
Friday, May 22, 2020 - 10:00
in Biology & Nature
When plants grow close together, each individual plant has less chance of doing well—at least, that was the accepted wisdom in environmental research. Now Dr. Ruichang Zhang and Professor Katja Tielbörger from the Institute of Evolution and Ecology at the University of Tübingen are challenging that principle. Their investigation of the combined effects of environmental stress and competition on plants has led them to develop a new theoretical model suggesting that plants can 'help' each other out. The researchers were able to confirm their model predictions in detail in an experiment with real plants. Their study has been published in the latest Nature Communications.