Plant-microbe symbiosis widens the habitability range of the Daisyworld

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. The published version of this Preprint is available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtbi.2022.111275. This is version 1 of this Preprint.

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Authors

Estefanía Muñoz, Jorge Carneiro

Abstract

Plant-microbe symbiosis is pervasive in the Earth's ecosystems and dates back to the early land colonisation by plants. Mutualistic partnership with rhizobia bacteria and mycorrhizal fungi promotes plant nutrition, growth and diversity, impacting important ecosystem functions. However, how the global behaviour and dynamical properties of an ecosystem are modified by plant-microbe symbiosis is still unclear. To tackle this theoretical question, we resorted to the Daisyworld as a toy model of the global ecosystem. We redesigned the original model to allow accounting for seed production, spreading, germination, and seedling development to mature seed-producing plants to describe how symbiotic and non-symbiotic daisy species differ in these key processes. Using the steady-state and bifurcation analysis of this model, we demonstrate that symbiosis with microbes broadens the habitability range of the Daisyworld by enhancing plant growth and/or facilitating plant access to otherwise uninhabitable nutrient-poor regions.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.31223/X5KS8N

Subjects

Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Keywords

Mathematical model, Symbiosis, Ecosystem, global temperature

Dates

Published: 2022-05-04 09:58

Last Updated: 2022-05-04 16:58

License

CC BY Attribution 4.0 International

Additional Metadata

Conflict of interest statement:
None

Data Availability (Reason not available):
It is a theoretical study, so we do not use any data