The exploitative segregation of plant roots: a game-theoretical framework for belowground plant interactions.

Plant roots determine carbon uptake, survivorship, and agricultural yield and represent a large proportion of the world’s vegetation carbon pool. The study of below-ground competition, unlike above-ground competition, is hampered by our inability to observe roots. We have few observations of intact root systems in soil and lack a comprehensive theory for root system responses to their environment and the presence of other individuals. In this presentation, I will first review previous efforts to explain plant below-ground interactions and discuss how they lead to seemingly contradictory predictions. Then, I will introduce our recent work and show how it resolves existing controversy and provides a unifying framework to study below-ground plant interactions. I will conclude by discussing future research lines that depart from our results, how they can be addressed with extensions of our original model, and how to test them experimentally.