The new view, by contrast, is that plants are dynamic and highly sensitive organisms, actively and competitively foraging for limited resources both above and below ground, and that they are also organisms which accurately compute their circumstances, use sophisticated cost-benefit analysis, and that take defined actions to mitigate and control diffuse environmental insults. Moreover, plants are also capable of a refined recognition of self and non-self and this leads to territorial behavior. This new view considers plants as information-processing organisms with complex communication throughout the individual plant. Plants are as sophisticated in behavior as animals but their potential has been masked because it operates on time scales many orders of magnitude longer than that operation in animals.... Owing to this lifestyle, the only long-term response to rapidly changing environments is an equally rapid adaptation; therefore, plants have developed a very robust signaling and information-processing apparatus.... Besides abundant interactions with the environment, plants interact with other communicative systems such as other plants, fungi, nematodes, bacteria, viruses, insects, and predatory animals.
⚘ Baluska et al., "Neurobiological view of plants and their body plan," in Baluska, Mancuso, Volkmann, eds., Communications in Plants, 31