Crop plants adapt to each other to improve their productivity

Coevolution experiment between crop species at the Aprisco Experimental Station, Torrejón el Rubio (Cáceres)

This is the main result of a study carried out by the Biodiversity and Conservation area of the URJC, together with the ETH Zurich. In this work, the scientific team has observed how crops adapt and evolve depending on the community of plants that grow around them.

Irene Vega

Organisms that interact with each other frequently and over generations tend to coevolve, that is, they adapt to each other to perfect their interaction until making it more efficient. From this premise, Anja Schmutz and Christian Schöb began research with annual crop plants at the ETH Zurich, in collaboration with the Rey Juan Carlos University. Some of them have grown for several generations with specific neighboring plant species and others have grown alone, without any plants around. The results of this research have been recently published in the PNAS scientific journal and confirm that plants evolved in one way or another depending on their neighborhood.

Through this experiment, carried out with six species of annual crops, the authors have been able to demonstrate coevolution between plants in a plant community and how this coadaptation has consequences for the functioning of the ecosystem. “Plant coevolution has profound implications not only for natural plant communities, but also for the interdependencies of organisms in a community because these can aggravate the consequences of global changes on a species,” explains Christian Schöb, researcher in the area. of Biodiversity and Conservation of the URJC from 2022.

This research is also important for the agricultural practice currently promoted by mixed cropping, where today crops adapted and improved for use in monoculture are used. “Here, our results suggest that crops specifically adapted to grow with a diverse neighborhood would increase productivity beyond the generally recognized benefits of mixture cultivation on yield compared to monoculture,” highlights the URJC researcher.

This work therefore provides empirical evidence that plants in a diverse community can adapt to each other if they coexist for several generations.

Collaboration between URJC and ETH Zurich

The study is the result of the project “Coevolution of plant-plant interactions: A forgotten factor in the coexistence of species, the distribution of resources and the functioning of ecosystems?”, funded by the ETH Zurich. This work is part of the Crop Diversity Experiment, carried out at the Aprisco experimental station (Torrejón el Rubio, Cáceres) since 2018 - a collaboration between the ETH Zurich and the URJC - and since 2023 it is funded by the State Research Agency.

Christian Schöb has led the group of agricultural ecology until the end of 2021 at the Institute of Agricultural Sciences of the ETH Zurich (Switzerland) and from 2022 he directs this group in the Biodiversity and Conservation area of the URJC.