Plant Evolutionary Ecology Workgroup

The main focus of our group is to understand how plants adjust to their environment throughout their lifetime, adapt across generations within a single species and over longer evolutionary periods across species. The studied environmental factor can be abiotic, such as the availability of light and soil nutrients, or biotic – a neighboring plant of the same or different genotype or species, a microbial cooperative partner, a pathogen, or a herbivore. Plants must simultaneously adapt to a multifaceted environment, raising questions about how plants optimize different tasks, how trade-offs emerge between traits related to growth, reproduction and tissue defence, and which strategy proves successful in a given environment. Of special interest to us is the study of belowground interactions. A significant portion of carbon fixed in photosynthesis moves below ground and plays a crucial role in mediating both interplant and plant-microbe interactions, as well as in regulating nutrient cycling. Carbon fixation and its allocation belowground differ significantly between different plant species and genotypes and are highly dependent on the environment. How can we describe plant strategies for carbon fixation and distribution to different functions? What are the evolutionary forces behind these strategies? Answering these questions improves our understanding of the functioning and development of ecosystems and enables predicting how human activities can modify these ecosystems.