Faculty Mentor, Dr. Nicholas McLetchie: This work represents a critical preliminary effort to quantify the Tragedy of the Commons (ToC) in plants growing in translucent growth medium. To the best of our knowledge, the application of translucent growth medium to ToC root studies pioneered here is completely novel. This development should allow future ToC studies of root competition to directly assess the effects of root competition on the spatial structure of root systems in real time throughout

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... the life cycle of the developing plants. This will, in turn, inform the future development of spatially explicit simulation models of root growth. We believe that the groundwork laid in this study will ultimately transform the contemporary understanding of the nature of the Tragedy of the Commons in root competition. The growth protocol developed here represents extremely high quality work on Chris's part, which easily warrants publication.