Sustainable scenarios in a plants–rhizobacteria–plant consumers system are in risk when biotic or abiotic factors change

Abstract

The ecological relationship among plants, rhizobacteria and plant consumers has attracted the attention of researchers due to its implications in field crops. It is known that, the rhizosphere is occupied not only by rhizobacteria which grant benefits to the plants but also by bacteria which are detrimental for them. In this work, we construct and analyze a plants–rhizobacteria–plant consumers system. In the modeling process, it is assumed that there is a conditioned interaction between plants and bacteria in the rhizosfera such that there is a mutualistic relationship at low densities of rhizobacteria and the relationship is parasitic or competitive at higher densities of them. Benefits granted by rhizobacteria include mechanisms that increase the plant growth and defense mechanisms against plant consumers. From the analysis of the model and its simplified version, we show that scenarios of coexistence of all populations can occur for a wide range of values of the parameters which describe biotic or abiotic factors; however, these scenarios are in risk since scenarios of exclusion of species can occur simultaneously due to the presence of bistability phenomena. The results obtained can be useful for the decision makers to design interventions strategies on field crops when plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria are used.