Abstract
Competition between plants can be seen as the outcome of a game, where the winner is the plant that does better than all its competitors. As a consequence, productivity may even go down during evolution, as long as others do worse. However, no experimental proof exists, and how such a competitive process may lead to different species with different growth forms to coexist remains unknown. This project will analyze how competition for light between plants of a single species will lead to a lower production. However, it will also analyze when the same process will lead to the coexistence of multiple species. Both an experimental approach, using transgenic plants, and a modeling approach will be used. The experimental approach will show for the first time how competition within a single species can lower the productivity of plants. It will also demonstrate that this process can allow a smaller species to coexist with a tall species. The modeling part will built on existing models of height growth, and extend them to analyze when species with different heights will be able to coexist.
Netherlands