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.
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.
I guess my advice was much more specific to traditional “weeds” which are annuals/ biannual / short lived perennials which thrive in disturbed land and in gardens. Bamboo is woody and might not full under that category. These traditionally “weeds” would be plants like creeping bellflower, motherwort, pigweed, plantains, dock, etc. which are human focused plants who only really thrive around human intervention. Plants like these are ubiquitous around humans (in our gardens and lawns) but can’t penetrated less disturbed areas or at later stages of succession. These are our traditional garden weeds which have a long history of use as food sources and medicinal uses with human cultures. If anyone is interested in learning more I would recommend Weeds: In Defense of Nature’s Most Unloved Plants which does a great overview of weeds and their spread.
Those plant that get fully invasive outside of human contact like Purple loosestrife, Tree of Heaven or other invasive noxious weeds are a different story. These are typically garden escapes, have a longer lifecycle and can outcompete and dominates landscapes. I think bamboo might fall closer to this than traditional weeds.
P.S. added the book to my to read list