Abstract: Plant roots determine carbon uptake, survivorship, and agricultural yield and represent a large proportion of the world’s vegetation carbon pool. The study of belowground competition, unlike aboveground shoot competition, is hampered by our inability to observe roots. We have few observations of intact root systems in soil and lack a comprehensive theory for root system responses to their environment.

In this presentation, I will first review previous efforts to explain plant belowground competition and discuss how they lead to seemingly contradictory predictions. Then, I will introduce our recent work and show how it resolves existing controversy and provides a unifying framework to study belowground plant interactions. I will conclude by discussing future research lines that depart from our results and how they can be addressed with extensions of our original model