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In plants, prolonged dormancy is often considered a response to resource depletion or environmental stress that comes at a fitness cost. However, apparent costs of dormancy could reflect the state in which plants entered dormancy, rather than effects of dormancy per se. We tested this hypothesis for a terrestrial orchid, Epipactis atrorubens, by analyzing differences in vital rates of dormant and emergent plants using generalized linear mixed models, applied to eight years of demographic data. Dormant E. atrorubens plants did not form one homogeneous stage class. Instead, the vital rates of dormant plants mirrored performance of plants in their life stage before dormancy. Plants emerging from dormancy were slightly (albeit only marginally statistically significantly) larger than plants transitioning from the matching aboveground stage class, especially for smaller and younger stage classes. Because small plants were most likely to go dormant, plants emerging from dormancy were also smaller than average, if one were to compare all previously dormant plants to all previously emergent plants. Therefore, misclassifying all dormant plants into a single stage class changes whether we view dormancy as intrinsically costly, in terms of future performance upon emergence. We suggest that prolonged dormancy may be a form of phenotypic plasticity in which plants distribute their performance and reproductive effort through time, rather than a simple stress response.

To focus conservation efforts into forest areas with high biodiversity, more information is needed about soil-vegetation dependencies in Finnish Lapland. We studied understory vegetation and soil variables along a transect across a felsic-mafic lithological sequence in central Finnish Lapland. At 119 northern boreal forest sites, coverages of understory vegetation, several mineral soil chemical elements, soil electrical conductivity, pH, and dielectric permittivity, as a measure of soil volumetric water content, were measured. We found that soil Ca concentration and Ca:Al ratio were the main variables determining vegetation composition and diversity. Ca-rich soils were characterised by high electrical conductivity, pH, and Mg concentration, and by low concentration of Al, S, Zn, and low C:N ratio. Soil Ca concentration is a diagnostic measure of plant diversity as concentration higher than 100 mg kg -1 resulted in a considerable increase in plant diversity. Sites with Ca concentration this high were rare, and probably important in maintaining high biodiversity. The median soil Ca:Al ratio was only 0.02, suggesting, according to general theory, a considerable risk for aluminium stress. We found Geranium sylvaticum and Rubus saxatilis to be good indicators for Ca-rich regimes and high plant diversity.

As a result of global changes, shifts of alpine tree lines towards higher elevations have been recorded, but the role of the spatial variability of the snowpack and zonal‐pattern soil‐nutrient regimes is poorly understood. Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst) is best suited to fertile soils, and hence we applied soil physical‐chemical and snow measurements and the age chronology of Norway spruce along an elevational gradient (380–557 m a.s.l.) to address a vertical soil zonality hypothesis on mafic Lommoltunturi fell in Finnish Lapland. With regard to increasing elevation, we found an increase in soil NTOT, CTOT and Al, but a decrease in soil Ca, Mg and Ca:Al ratio as well as in electrical conductivity (EC). In addition, the snowpack was significantly thicker in low‐elevation forest than in the tree line and open tundra. In the 1840s, spruce established on low‐elevation soils with a Ca:Al ratio of 2.2. Starting from the 1920s a significant shift of spruce occurred such that it took 60 years to expand the tree line by 55 m in elevation. The spruce tree line has advanced, and the age distribution indicates new colonization of spruce in closed forest up to tundra. The poor soil Ca:Al ratio of 0.02 on tundra apparently is a constraint for spruce. Spruce forest is young (<165 years), and hence we argue that spruce has expanded onto formerly tree‐free sites of this mafic fell. This paper demonstrates that vertical soil zonality is a potential driver for the diffuse tree line of Picea abies on mafic Fennoscandian fells.

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