Functional traits predict relationship between plant abundance dynamic and long-term climate warming

Abstract

Predicting climate change impact on ecosystem structure and services is one of the most important challenges in ecology. Until now, plant species response to climate change has been described at the level of fixed plant functional types, an approach limited by its inflexibility as there is much interspecific functional variation within plant functional types. Considering a plant species as a set of functional traits greatly increases our possibilities for analysis of ecosystem functioning and carbon and nutrient fluxes associated therewith. Moreover, recently assembled large-scale databases hold comprehensive per-species data on plant functional traits, allowing a detailed functional description of many plant communities on Earth. Here, we show that plant functional traits can be used as predictors of vegetation response to climate warming, accounting in our test ecosystem (the species-rich alpine belt of Caucasus mountains, Russia) for 59% of variability in the per-species abundance relation to temperature. In this mountain belt, traits that promote conservative leaf water economy (higher leaf mass per area, thicker leaves) and large investments in belowground reserves to support next year's shoot buds (root carbon content) were the best predictors of the species increase in abundance along with temperature increase. This finding demonstrates that plant functional traits constitute a highly useful concept for forecasting changes in plant communities, and their associated ecosystem services, in response to climate change.alpine plant community | root traits | plant traits | seed mass | specific leaf area C limate change is affecting the structure and composition of vegetation worldwide. Increasing temperatures are considered to be a key driver of recent tundra greening (1, 2) and upward migration of vascular plant species in mountains (3-6). Predicting climate change impact on ecosystem structure and services is one of the most important challenges in ecology (7). Previous studies of plant response to warming used concepts of growth form or functional type as predictors of plant response to warming and demonstrated that evergreen and deciduous (dwarf) shrubs and rushes increase their abundance in response to experimental warming in cold biomes (1, 8). However, the categorization of plants into fixed functional types has been criticized for being imprecise and too coarse for accurate prediction of plant response to climate change (9).Considering a plant species as a set of functional traits instead of an entity belonging to a fixed functional type greatly increases our possibilities for analysis of ecosystem functioning (10), enabling generalization of our knowledge on plant functioning at ecosystem, landscape, or regional scale. When linked to directional changes in the abundance of plant species, variation in traits involved in plant effects on biogeochemical cycling can be applied in estimates of changes in ecosystem carbon and nutrient turnover (9). This provides a powerful tool in environmental assessment an...

Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community

“…We measured SLA (mm 2· g −1 of dry mass) because of its widely documented links to water balance (33-37) and to the community-level consequences of aridification (38,39). For clarity in interpretation, we focused this analysis on native annual forbs, the functional group largely responsible for the time trend in species richness.…”

“…Species with high SLA and RGR, and low LL and WUE, are more prevalent in wetter climates (34) and in wetter years (35) and tend to increase disproportionately in response to experimental watering (36) and natural precipitation increase (37). Several previous studies have found that high-SLA species are especially vulnerable to decline or loss under aridification (38,39).…”

Response of Leaf Functional Traits of Cerasus yedoensis (Mats.) Yü Li to Serious Insect Attack

“…Leaves exhibit phenotypic plasticity in response to changes in environmental factors to help plants improve fitness; with phenotypic plasticity, plants can utilize a successful ecological strategy in changing environments during life processes [2,[7][8][9]. In addition to phenotypic plasticity, specific leaf area (SLA, defined as investment per unit of light capture surface deployed) can indicate the adaptability of plants to different habitats; as such, SLA is a key functional trait reflecting the trade-off between resource capture and conservation (e.g., high SLA can indicate high resource acquisition and use efficiency with low investment in leaf construction and protective tissues according to the leaf economic spectrum) [7][8][10][11].…”

“…In addition to phenotypic plasticity, specific leaf area (SLA, defined as investment per unit of light capture surface deployed) can indicate the adaptability of plants to different habitats; as such, SLA is a key functional trait reflecting the trade-off between resource capture and conservation (e.g., high SLA can indicate high resource acquisition and use efficiency with low investment in leaf construction and protective tissues according to the leaf economic spectrum) [7][8][10][11]. Furthermore, leaf size, leaf thickness, leaf shape index (calculated as the ratio of leaf length to leaf width), single leaf dry weight, and leaf moisture are important indices of leaf functional traits because these indices can be used as indicators of resourceuse strategy of plants [2,[7][8]. Under normal conditions, leaf functional traits may withstand the effects of many intrinsic and extrinsic factors, such as light intensity, soil physiochemical properties, soil nutrient contents (particularly nitrogen), temperature, and precipitation [2,[6][7][8].…”

Recovery of plant community functional traits following severe soil perturbation in plantations: a case-study

“…Functional biodiversity can be assessed at the plant level by measuring plant functional traits (plant characteristics related to functions). By simplifying taxonomic diversity to functional diversity, traits provide a process-oriented representation of the plant community (Lavorel et al 1997) to help identify the mechanisms that drive community change, which, in turn, influence ecosystem functioning (Lavorel & Garnier 2002;Lavorel 2013;Soudzilovskaia et al 2013). This approach is useful for studying the effect of environmental processes that operate at different scales, influencing local species assemblages and inducing non-random plant community structures (Aubin et al 2014).…”