Running bamboo is notoriously fast spreading and difficult to remove. What keeps its population balanced in the wild, and prevents it from crowding out the competition? I tried googling, but was inundated with gardening advice, horror stories, and assault / offensive gardening (some of the latter two presumably covering the same incident from both sides). My google-fu failed, I couldn’t really find any info about natural population controls of running bamboo in the thicket of tall tales and gardening advice.
I think an important thing to understand when talking about plant populations is to understand how they compete against each other. all kind of understand how animals compete because its dramatic with claws, fangs, speed and eating. They also compete more subtle with birthing rates, eating all the food faster than others but they are behaviors we can see. Each animal has it own ecological niche which they thrive
Since plants cannot move (mostly true) they compete against animals and other plants in other ways. They use chemicals to poison others, alter the soil for their own needs or attempt to shade out other plants. They also compete in a different timescale than animals. They may only grow for a few months of the year before anything else grows or have a super short reproductive cycle and flower multiple times per year or play the long game and invest into woody structure to grow taller and live longer than other plants. These are their own niches which include everything about temperature (both highs, lows, days at certain temperatures etc.), soil conditions, nearby plants, animals to help or hurt them and timeframes. These are plant’s niches. This means a plant community is never static. It is driven by a process called Ecological Succession
The things about garden and yards is that we don’t have a stable or natural ecosystem which means they are more unstable. We artificially keep it in a early stage of succession with mowing, fertilizers and pulling of weeds. This leaves plenty of open niches for things like bamboo to exploit. That is why pulling or poisoning of weeds just keep coming back since nothing is there to stop it from filling that niche again. So something like bamboo is almost impossible to remove without something else to outcompetes it in its niche. If we did nothing the bamboo would likely take over most of the grass and garden but eventually (in timeframes of years or decades) something else would eventually take it over or others would fill in around it. Usually plants growing creates additional niches alongside it. The succession would take over and alter the ecosystem.
This means that for something like bamboo we should attempt to control it in our garden setting with rhimozone barriers so it doesn’t run wild. Having things like native perennials or other perennials around it should outcompete any newer sprouts can help as well. Moreover, if you have weeds in your garden they will always be there unless you have something else already there. Any bare soil is just open ground for volunteer plants (a.k.a weeds) to take over to fill the empty niche. So to remove something you might not want you need to both pull it and have something else to replace it.
Good starting point, but the eventually does a lot of heavy lifting here.
When plants move into a new area, they can sometimes outcompetes the species already present very effectively, and can spread unchecked, dominating the landscape and creating a monoculture. However a monoculture is more vulnerable to pestilence or disease, so eventually in years, decades, or who knows how long, a disease may spread in bamboo suppressing the population, or some new pest may evolve a way to eat bamboo more effectively and spread rapidly. Or other plants may develop other strategies. Again, in a matter of years or centuries or who knows, bamboo can become balanced out by these factors and become enmeshed in a more stable food web / ecology, which may not resemble the ecology which existed before bamboo came to that area.
P.S. I recommend reading a book called Semiosis by Sue Burke. It’s all about humans who make a colony on an alien world, and over the span of nine generations develop a symbiosis with the plant species there, which are sentient.