Similar, to how humans interact with each other on a daily basis, plants do so as well. The main difference being, that plants can’t run away when the company sucks. Being sessile essentially means that plants are stuck to whatever neighbours they get. This dependency has created some truly fascinating interactions between plants. 

As a Phd candidate in the Ecology and Biodiversity group, my research focusses on the positive plant interactions (Facilitation) that occur within plant communities, and how we can potentially harness them to restore degraded grasslands. 

One of these facilitative interactions is microclimate amelioration, in which plants cool the local microscale conditions around them, making them more suitable for the neighbouring plants. I attempt to identify the plant functional traits which are predictive for this cooling effect. As climate change will create increase global temperatures and create increasingly stressful conditions, these cooling effects of biodiversity might become increasingly important. 

The Utrecht University Biodiversity and Climate Variability Experiment, (https://www.uu.nl/en/research/ecology-and-biodiversity/research/uu-bioclive) is an experiment manipulating both plant diversity and precipitation. This set-up allows the testing of facilitation under both current and future conditions, and how plant diversity can provide us with natural buffering against climate change.