Little attention has been paid to how aquatic habitat characteristics affect the traits of plant species. Nuphar lutea (L.) Sm. is a keystone species distributed across temperate regions of Europe, northwest Africa and western Asia. Its apparently low phenotypic variability compared to other aquatic plants led us to test whether the species exhibited significant phenotypic variability and whether trait values correlated to environmental parameters. The hypotheses were that (1) the environmental variation within our set of wetlands (both water and sediment characteristics) led to significant variation among four sets of traits related respectively to growth, reproduction, defence and storage and (2) that nutrient limitation (nitrogen and especially phosphorus) should affect plant traits towards a higher investment in storage and defence and a lower investment in growth and reproduction, thereby negatively affecting the success of N. lutea. To test these hypotheses, 11 populations of N. lutea were sampled in wetlands differing in physicochemical characteristics and spread along three rivers. A total of 15 traits, grouped into four sets (growth, reproduction, storage and defence), were measured during the growing season. Most N. lutea traits were related to the environmental characteristics of wetlands. The growth and reproduction traits were mostly positively related to habitat resource conditions, whereas the defence traits were positively correlated with both ammonium concentration and temperature, outlining possible anoxic stress (habitat adversity). Nitrogen or phosphorus limitation led to the variation of only a few traits: the rhizome starch content was higher in phosphorus-limited wetlands, while the rhizome length and volume, and the number of flowers were higher in nitrogen-limited wetlands.
International audienceWe conducted an in situ decomposition experiment to better understand how habitat nutrient content controls aquatic plant decomposition and, more precisely, to determine the relative importance of the wetland conditions in decomposition, and the intrinsic degradability of plant tissues. We collected the green leaves of three aquatic plant species with contrasting plant strategies from three wetlands of differing nutrient contents, and allowed them todecompose in seven wetlands along a nutrient gradient. The plant mass loss was higher for competitive and ruderal species collected in nutrient richer wetlands as well as when they were led to decompose in nutrient richer wetlands. Plant water content correlated with mass loss for the competitive and ruderal species, which may explain the increase in mass loss with increasing nutrient content in the collection wetlands. Litter decomposition rate may be enhanced by wetland eutrophication, because of both the modification of wetland decomposition conditions and by changes in plant tissue quality
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