Simulation of optimal rooting strategies: What's the best way to find a wet crack?

Abstract

Plants evolve ecological strategies to optimally exploit the limited resources available in their environment, such as water. This involves accounting for temporal and spatial patterns in the availability of the resource. Simulation modelling can be used to explore how the optimality of different strategies depends on these patterns, thus giving insight into why different species of plants employ different strategies depending on their local environment, and how these strategies are optimized for the resource availability patterns of their particular environment. This paper describes a computational model that simulates a variety of plant rooting strategies. We first describe some motivating case studies based on plants searching for relativity rare wet cracks in otherwise impermeable rock layers, and how these studies raise some important ecological questions. We then explain how the model has been constructed to be able to represent a wide range of relevant rooting strategies; give some example outputs to illustrate the capabilities of the model; and discuss how the model has been linked with computational optimization algorithms to identify how optimal ecological strategies vary with patterns of resource availability.