Interactions among plants and evolution

Abstract

Summary 1.Interactions among plants and their consumers, pollinators and dispersers are central to evolutionary theory, but interactions among plants themselves have received much less attention. Thus focusing more attention on the evolutionary role of plant-plant interactions may provide greater insight into the processes that organize communities. 2. Here, we integrate divergent themes in the literature in an effort to provide a synthesis of empirical evidence and ideas about how plant interactions may affect evolution and how evolution may affect plant interactions. 3. First, we discuss the idea of niche partitioning evolving through competitive interactions among plants, the idea of niche construction evolving through facilitative interactions, and the connections between these ideas and more recent research on diversity and ecosystem function and trait-based community organization. 4. We then review how a history of coexistence within a region might affect competitive outcomes and explore the mechanisms by which plants exert selective forces on each other. Next, we consider recent research on invasions suggesting that plant interactions can reflect regional evolutionary trajectories. Finally, we place these lines of research into the context of extended phenotypes and the geographic mosaic of co-evolution. 5. Synthesis. Our synthesis of separate lines of inquiry is a step towards understanding the evolutionary importance of interactions among plants, and suggests that the evolutionary consequences of interactions contribute to communities that are more than assemblages of independent populations.

Coevolution between invasive and native plants driven by chemical competition and soil biota

“…Phenotype matching has previously been shown in very specialized systems involving consumer-resource interactions (4). Competitive interactions are rarely so tightly linked, especially in plants, and thus interactions between any two species have been considered too inconsistent to lead to specific evolutionary responses (16). Instead, plants are expected to respond to the average community, rather than to particular species.…”

Phenotypic differentiation within a foundation grass species correlates with species richness in a subalpine community

“…Plant community genetic studies have mainly focused on competition or allelopathy (lankau and strauss 2007; Bossdorf et al 2009;silvertown et al 2009), while evolutionary questions associated with positive interactions among plants (i.e. facilitation) such as nurse plant effects remain less documented (but see Valiente-Banuet et al 2006;liancourt and tielbörger 2011;michalet et al 2011;thorpe et al 2011;Butterfield et al 2013). Facilitative interactions are known to have strong effects on community and ecosystem properties, including diversity, structure, productivity and stability (michalet et al 2006;Callaway 2007;Brooker et al 2008;le Bagousse-Pinguet et al 2014a).…”

Morphological adaptation of a palatable plant to long-term grazing can shift interactions with an unpalatable plant from facilitative to competitive

“…Interactions among plants can lead to co-evolution and evolution of plant traits (reviewed in Thorpe et al 2011). The evolutionary origins and maintenance of facilitation, however, have yet to be explored.…”