Facilitation in plants

Facilitation.

Of course, it is not a new word for us.

Well, most of us know this from the group meetings. Am I right? Normally, when we are in a group meeting, there will be a person whom we call a facilitator, who encourages us to actively participate and work towards a common goal, and that process is Facilitation. This not only happens in the human community, but it also happens with other living organisms like plants and microbes. We focus on plant facilitation in this blog.

In ecology, facilitation is how the environment of one plant helps another, and it is not intentional, but it looks like it is helping a neighbour.

This is a positive plant-to-plant interaction. To be clear, it is not always mutually beneficial for the plants. It is simply using the components produced by one plant that improve the growth of the other. One common example that might come to mind for agricultural or botanical enthusiasts is growing legumes (such as pulses and peas) near cereals (like rice and maize). That's right.

Fig. 1. Facilitation in maize–faba bean intercropping: maize root exudates can stimulate faba bean nodulation → more N₂ fixation.

Credit: Illustration generated with OpenAI (DALL·E); concept based on Li et al. (2016) and Hu et al. (2021).

One example is maize and faba bean intercropping (Fig. 1). In this case, maize releases root exudates that increase the root nodulation in faba beans, and the faba beans fix nitrogen as well as enhance phosphorus availability, which helps maize growth and improves yield. In this case, both crops benefit.

I hope you now have a clear idea of facilitation in plants—and you can use the term promptly.

Reference:

Li et al., 2016. Root exudates drive interspecific facilitation by enhancing nodulation and N₂ fixation.

Zhang et al., 2016. Increased soil phosphorus availability induced by faba bean root exudation stimulates root growth and phosphorus uptake in neighbouring maize.

Hu et al., 2021. Nitrogen fixation and crop productivity enhancements co-driven by intercrop root exudates and key rhizosphere bacteria.