Will fluctuating environmental conditions increase the ability of being plastic for plants?

What is it about?

People have been exploring how diverse species are able to successfully survive and persist in the constantly chaning world in a long history. They believed that the ability of being responsive to environments plays an important part for these species, especially for plant species. However, when and where will such ability function more frequently or be more important? Whether and how will such ability be affected by other factors? These questions have been poorly understood. We showed how this ability can be altered by environmental heterogeneity for different plant species.

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Photo by Peter Žagar on Unsplash

Photo by Peter Žagar on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Some researchers predict that fluctuation in resource availability will increase such ability, which has been proved by little direct evidence. We provided the direct evidence for the increase of responsive ability of plants with fluactuating water conditions, and exotic responded to early experience of water fluctuation more rapidly, while native species were more able to benefit their later growth from early experience. These findings should be important for understanding how plants adapt to the changing world in a flexible and diverse way.

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