Decisions, decisions, decisions: plant roots detect and respond to complex environmental cues

Author(s): Ragan M. Callaway, Long Li

Abstract

The ability to detect and react in ecologically meaningful ways to variation in the environment can affect the abundance, distribution and fitness of organisms. This is axiomatic for most animals, but figuring out how and why plants behave in this way is more difficult and requires patience (Hodge, 2009). However, the benefits of complex responses to the environment are no different for plants than animals – finding and assessing the availability of resources, avoiding harm from competitors or predators, or locating a mate. In this context, our understanding of adaptive plant behavior has been steadily expanding. In this issue of New Phytologist in an article entitled ‘Neighbouring plants modify maize root foraging for phosphorus: coupling nutrients and neighbours for improved nutrient-use efficiency’, Zhang et al. (2020; pp. 244–253) make an important contribution to this expansion. They report that plant roots can respond in complex and conditional ways to combinations of abiotic and biotic stimuli. Specifically, Zhang et al. found that the ‘foraging strategy of maize roots is an integrated function of heterogeneous distribution of nutrients and neighbouring plants, thus improving nutrient acquisition and maize growth’. In addition to species-specific root proliferation patterns in response to either neighbors or nutrient patches, Zhang et al. found that the roots of maize were less abundant, and spent less time, in phosphorus (P) patches with other maize plants in the neighborhood, than in P patches with faba bean neighbors.

Citation

Callaway, R. M., & Li, L. (2020). Decisions, decisions, decisions: plant roots detect and respond to complex environmental cues. New Phytologist, 226(1), 11–12. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.16372