Clonal plants and facilitation research: bridging the gap

Abstract

Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in facilitative plant-plant interactions. Research has examined the relationships between the role of plant interactions and gradients of environmental severity, the consequences of facilitation for biodiversity at a range of scales and the integration of facilitation into mainstream ecological theories. However, there appears to be a lack of research that explicitly links facilitation and the study of plant clonality. This is surprising given the common co-occurrence of high levels of facilitation and clonality in some systems, for example arctic and alpine environments, and the possibility for clonality to play a role in regulating facilitation processes. I propose a number of areas where there is considerable potential for bringing these two topics together, including the re-analysis of large-scale databases and multi-site experiments, the development of modelling approaches combining both facilitation and clonality and the testing of these approaches through field experimentation. I also discuss some of the studies that are starting to address this research gap, and that indicate how we might in future bring these research topics closer together.