Competition for Light and Nutrients in Layered Communities of Aquatic Plants

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Online enhancement: appendixes.abstract: Dominance of free-floating plants poses a threat to biodiversity in many freshwater ecosystems. Here we propose a theoretical framework to understand this dominance, by modeling the competition for light and nutrients in a layered community of floating and submerged plants. The model shows that at high supply of light and nutrients, floating plants always dominate due to their primacy for light, even when submerged plants have lower minimal resource requirements. The model also shows that floating-plant dominance cannot be an alternative stable state in light-limited environments but only in nutrient-limited environments, depending on the plants' resource consumption traits. Compared to unlayered communities, the asymmetry in competition for light-coincident with symmetry in competition for nutrients-leads to fundamentally different results: competition outcomes can no longer be predicted from species traits such as minimal resource requirements (R * rule) and resource consumption. Also, the same two species can, depending on the environment, coexist or be alternative stable states. When applied to two common plant species in temperate regions, both the model and field data suggest that floating-plant dominance is unlikely to be an alternative stable state.

Growth strategy, phylogeny and stoichiometry determine the allelopathic potential of native and non‐native plants

“…Non‐native plants, for instance, often differ in phylogeny from natives, which can provide a competitive advantage (Hill and Kotanen , Parker et al ). Furthermore, the growth strategy of plants is generally phylogenetically determined (Scharfy et al ) and the growth strategy can make certain invaders more dominant, for example forbs over graminoids, or floating over submerged plants (Scharfy et al , van Gerven et al ). Although multiple factors control variation in secondary metabolites in concert, they are often studied separately.…”

Invasive Eichhornia crassipes Affects the Capacity of Submerged Macrophytes to Utilize Nutrients

“…Because floating and submerged plants have different positions in the water column, the competition for both light and nutrients in the substrate becomes asymmetric [13]. Van Gerven et al [42] found that floating plants always outcompete submerged plants when there is an adequate supply of light and nutrients. Moreover, an increasing nutrient level leads to an advance of free-floating species in competition with submerged macrophytes; this effect is also found in both field and mesocosm studies [43,44].…”

The ecology of ditches : a modeling perspective

“…S1). The model is based on theoretical frameworks for resource competition (Huisman and Weissing 1995;Van Gerven et al 2015a) and simulates the dynamics of plant biomass (gDW m -2 ) and the N and P concentrations (gN m -3 and gP m -3 ) in the water (Eqs. 3.1-3.4).…”

“…The critical nutrient loading is not only relevant to systems that possess alternative stable states such as shallow lakes, but also applies to systems that are not likely to have alternative stable states but still can be subject to abrupt shifts, such as ditches (Van Gerven et al 2015a). The critical nutrient loading of both ditches and shallow lakes was found to depend on system characteristics like water depth, sediment type and water flow Van Liere et al 2007).…”