Fishing for nutrients in heterogeneous landscapes: modelling plant growth trade-offs in monocultures and mixed communities.

ABSTRACT: The problem of how best to find and exploit essential resources, the quality and locations of which are unknown, is common throughout biology. For plants, the need to grow an efficient root system so as to acquire patchily distributed soil nutrients is typically complicated by competition between plants, and by the costs of maintaining the root system. Simple mechanistic models for root growth can help elucidate these complications, and here we argue that these models can be usefully informed by models initially developed for foraging fish larvae. Both plant and fish need to efficiently search a spatio-temporally variable environment using simple algorithms involving only local information, and both must perform this task against a backdrop of intra- and inter-specific competition and back

SUBMITTER: Croft SA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4641210 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature