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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Biophysics and Modeling
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1356506
This article is part of the Research Topic Genotype-Phenotype Models of Plant Growth: From Single Genes to Ideotype Prediction, Volume II View all articles

Impact of intraspecific genetic variation on interspecific competition: a theoretical case study of forage binary mixtures

Provisionally accepted
Gaëtan Louarn Gaëtan Louarn *Béatrice Wolff Béatrice Wolff Bernadette Julier Bernadette Julier
  • Institut National de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE), Paris, France

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Increasing intraspecific genetic variation (IV) has been identified as a potential factor to improve productivity and stabilise botanical composition in plant communities. In grasslands systems, this could offer a lever to manage uncertainties of production and variability in the harvested species balance. However, little is known about the conditions to favour IV impact and the mechanisms at play.The dependency of IV impact on traits holding it and environmental stressors were analysed using a spatially-explicit individual-based model (IBM) of grassland communities. Sixty-three binary mixtures were defined to reflect a gradient of functional divergence between species regarding light and nitrogen (N) acquisition. The growth and dynamics of these communities were simulated for one year with three possible IV levels under two environments contrasting in terms of soil N fertility.The model predicted a positive impact of moderate and high IV levels on maintaining the species balance over time, but no marked effects on mixture productivity. This stabilising effect increased at higher IV levels and under low soil N fertility. It also tended to be more pronounced in communities with intermediate functional divergence offering a significant overlap between light and N acquisition parameter values of both species. The major traits involved in the plant response to neighbours differed depending on the most contested resource, as indicated by the within-population selection of individuals with favourable Nrelated parameters under low N and light-related parameters under high N environments. The hypothesis that IV favours a complementarity of resource use between species was not supported. Rather, a greater spatial heterogeneity in competitive interactions was demonstrated, leading to a higher probability of growth and survival for individuals within the subordinate species.These results highlight the potential usefulness of IV to design forage mixtures with improved stability and resilience.

    Keywords: multi-species grasslands, genetic diversity, Individual-based model, competition, complementarity, Overyielding, Community stability

    Received: 15 Dec 2023; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Louarn, Wolff and Julier. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Gaëtan Louarn, Institut National de recherche pour l’agriculture, l’alimentation et l’environnement (INRAE), Paris, France

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