PARENT SESSION
Symposium 23: Comparative plant ecology as a tool for integrating across scales
Organized by: B Shipley
Friday, August 12, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 517 B, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Self-assembling plants and integration across ecological scales.
Hunt, Roderick*,1, Colasanti, Ric L2, 3, 1 School of Biosciences, University of Exeter, UK2 School of Applied Science, University of Glamorgan, UK3 Environmental Protection Agency, Corvallis, OR
ABSTRACT- Although individual plants exhibit a wide range of complex behaviour in response to environmental stimuli, they appear to do so without any identifiable centres of organisation. It can be shown that plants are effectively modular organisms, with whole-plant organization and behaviour emerging solely from the interactions of individual modules. Behaviour at the population and community levels of organization also emerges from this same source. A new cellular automaton model of plant growth comprises a two-dimensional section which depicts the plant in its above- and below-ground environments. The whole plant is represented by branching structures made up from identical 'modules'. The modules are driven by morphological, physiological and reproductive rulebases derived from comparative plant ecology. In real experiments done on these virtual plants we can reproduce a wide range of whole-plant-, population- and community-level behaviour. All of these properties emerge successfully from a ruleset acting only at the level of the individual module. Any temperate angiosperm can now be ascribed a functional classification on the basis of a few simple tests and any community of such plants can be redescribed in terms of its 'functional signature' and the net degree of environmental stress and disturbance which it experiences. To a valuable first approximation, therefore, the model can address the most essential properties of any stable or changing temperate vegetative system. It may also be used to test a plethora of high-level community processes, such as diversity, vulnerability, resistance, resilience, stability, and habitat-community heterogeneity - processes which, if investigated on the scales truly required for a full understanding, would generally fall beyond the practical scope of even the largest experimental investigation.
Key words: Cellular automata, Virtual plants, Functional types