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Inspire Session

Hybrid Session

Session: : When the Window Is a Mirror: How Do Dominant Theories Limit Our Understanding of Nature?

INS 23-6 - Must all plants compete? Evidence of self-facilitation challenges our understanding of how plant diversity is maintained in complex systems

Thursday, August 10, 2023

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM PDT

Location: 251

Presenting Author(s)

MB

Malyon D. Bimler

Postdoctoral Research Fellow
University of Melbourne, Queensland, Australia

Co-author(s)

MM

Margie M. Mayfield

Head of School and Professor of Ecology
University of Melbourne, Australia
TM

Trace Elizabeth Martyn

Yale School of the Environment, United States
HL

Hao Ran Lai

University of Canterbury, New Zealand
DS

Daniel B. Stouffer

University of Canterbury, New Zealand

Interactions between species drive the maintenance (or extinction) of diversity. Theory tells us that competition dominates between plants and drives species to extinction, whilst coexistence is achieved by a delicate balance of within and between-species competition. And facilitation? No need to worry, it is only a rare exception. Seeking to better understand this balance, I investigated interactions in a diverse wildflower system commonly used to study coexistence. To everyone's surprise, facilitation was ubiquitous between species, within species and across environments. How do we reframe our understanding of coexistence when species have the capacity to self-facilitate?