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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01ww72bf895
Title: Deciphering the Bamboo Enigma: The Competitive Strategy of a Forest Grass to Arrest Succession
Authors: Zheng, Aiyu
Advisors: Pacala, Stephen W
Contributors: Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department
Keywords: arrested succession
bamboo
competition
growth forms
plant life history
semelparous reproduction
Subjects: Ecology
Biology
Issue Date: 2024
Publisher: Princeton, NJ : Princeton University
Abstract: Despite growing research interests in bamboo as a versatile group of grasses with high socioeconomic values, many aspects of its peculiar ecological behavior, such as its century-long flowering, still perplex biologists. In this thesis, I introduce the bamboo enigma and present a theoretical framework of mathematical models to decipher this multi-faceted, complex puzzle that will guide future bamboo research. Chapter 1 synthesizes the unresolved mysteries in bamboo, hypothesizing that these characteristics are all essential elements of a competitive strategy for a structurally inferior grass to arrest succession in light-demanding forest habitats. Chapters 2-3 construct and explain this Arrested Succession Hypothesis to elucidate different mysteries outlined in Chapter 1. Chapter 1 demonstrates how bamboo arrests succession using the simplest individual-based models of bamboo and trees, which explain the regular life cycle of bamboo with semelparous and synchronous flowering, and why maximum culm size and age, reproductive interval, and rhizome length differ between bamboo species in the tropics and temperate zone. Chapter 2 investigates the landscape-level consequences of bamboo arresting succession using a spatial model incorporating patch-clearing disturbances. While competition among different bamboo strains pushes the most competitive flowering interval to infinity in Chapter 1, bamboo-tree competition pushes down the most competitive flowering interval to ensure bamboo’s colonization of disturbed forest space in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 thus focuses on this tension and offers a comprehensive explanation on bamboo’s reproductive behavior by finding the Evolutionary Stable Strategies of bamboo’s flowering interval in a landscape of coupled patches undergoing disturbances and light competition with trees. Finally, Chapter 4 presents an empirical study on the bamboo invasion front as an example to validate the model assumptions built into the theoretical framework of the Arrested Succession Hypothesis. Together, as the bamboo enigma unveils, my thesis emphasizes the importance of mechanistic understanding built upon natural and evolutionary history in advancing ecological research on forest structure and function.
URI: http://arks.princeton.edu/ark:/88435/dsp01ww72bf895
Type of Material: Academic dissertations (Ph.D.)
Language: en
Appears in Collections:Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

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