Joel Brown

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  Plants play games too: How the tragedy of the commons explains much about the vegetation we see
  Joel Brown

  Plant communities offer conspicuous displays of woody stems, masses of leaves, and often several layers of such vegetation. Plants in their quest to compete and reproduce seem to produce a lot of biomass.Plant’ play games for nutrients (belowground) and light (aboveground). The solutions to these games result from three sources of a tragedy of the commons. First, the plants over-produce roots to pre-empt each others access to water and nitrogen. Second, the plants do the same with their leaves to pre-empt access to light.And third, the plants may invest heavily in stems because the lion’s share of light goes to the tallest plant. We begin with a simple game of belowground root production, we can then examine how asymmetric competition for light amplifies the tragedy of the commons, and finally using a Cobb-Douglas production function we can integrate roots, leaves and stem into a single model of resource allocation in response to competition. Such models can be placed within the context of population dynamics, plant number, total plant biomass and ultimately new avenues for species coexistence. Not only does evolutionary game theory assist in understanding plants, arguable a game theoretic approach may be the only way to understand some of the most important features of plants and their communities.