Specific leaf area responses to environmental gradients through space and time

Dwyer, John M.; Hobbs, Richard J.; Mayfield, Margaret M.

doi:10.1890/13-0412.1

Cited by 173 publications

(164 citation statements)

References 43 publications

(43 reference statements)

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“…Our results highlight that taking temporal intraspecific variations of traits into consideration may lead to different and interesting findings. If traits measured in a wet year were used to calculate functional indices for communities in a dry year, conclusions might be misleading (Dwyer et al, 2014). In the future, a long-term study on both CWM and FDis is required.…”

Section: Mechanisms Of Functional Diversity Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal intraspecific trait variability drives responses of functional diversity to interannual aridity variation in grasslands

Huang

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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Interannual climate variation alters functional diversity through intraspecific trait variability and species turnover. We examined these diversity elements in three types of grasslands in northern China, including two temperate steppes and an alpine meadow. We evaluated the differences in community‐weighted means (CWM) of plant traits and functional dispersion (FDis) between 2 years with contrasting aridity in the growing season. Four traits were measured: specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC), leaf nitrogen concentration (LNC), and the maximum plant height (H). CWM for SLA of the alpine meadow increased in the dry year while that of the temperate steppe in Qinghai showed opposing trends. CWM of LDMC in two temperate steppes became higher and CWM of LNC in all grasslands became lower in the dry year. Compared with the wet year, FDis of LDMC in the alpine meadow and FDis of LNC in the temperate steppe in Qinghai decreased in the dry year. FDis of H was higher in the dry year for two temperate steppes. Only in the temperate steppe in Qinghai did the multi‐FDis of all traits experience a significant increase in the dry year. Most of the changes in CWM and FDis between 2 years were explained by intraspecific trait variation rather than shifts in species composition. This study highlights that temporal intraspecific trait variation contributes to functional responses to environmental changes. Our results also suggest it would be necessary to consider habitat types when modeling ecosystem responses to climate changes, as different grasslands showed different response patterns.

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Section: Mechanisms Of Functional Diversity Variationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal intraspecific trait variability drives responses of functional diversity to interannual aridity variation in grasslands

Huang

et al. 2019

Ecology and Evolution

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“…We also used the same traits to predict the probability that individual species will either decrease or increase under the treatments. We chose these traits because they are strongly linked to nutrient and water use (36,38,43,44).…”

Section: Significancementioning

confidence: 99%

Resource colimitation governs plant community responses to altered precipitation

Eskelinen

Harrison

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

111

117

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Ecological theory and evidence suggest that plant community biomass and composition may often be jointly controlled by climatic water availability and soil nutrient supply. To the extent that such colimitation operates, alterations in water availability caused by climatic change may have relatively little effect on plant communities on nutrient-poor soils. We tested this prediction with a 5-y rainfall and nutrient manipulation in a semiarid annual grassland system with highly heterogeneous soil nutrient supplies. On nutrient-poor soils, rainfall addition alone had little impact, but rainfall and nutrient addition synergized to cause large increases in biomass, declines in diversity, and near-complete species turnover. Plant species with resource-conservative functional traits (low specific leaf area, short stature) were replaced by species with resource-acquisitive functional traits (high specific leaf area, tall stature). On nutrient-rich soils, in contrast, rainfall addition alone caused substantial increases in biomass, whereas fertilization had little effect. Our results highlight that multiple resource limitation is a critical aspect when predicting the relative vulnerability of natural communities to climatically induced compositional change and diversity loss.biodiversity | climate change | resource colimitation | functional traits | low-productivity ecosystems C urrent and predicted climatic changes are expected to considerably alter the water balance experienced by terrestrial ecosystems. Climate change can lead to increases or decreases in mean annual rainfall, shifts in seasonal and annual rainfall variability, changes in the frequency and magnitude of extreme precipitation events, shifts from snow to rain, declining snowpack, and temperature-driven increases in the climatic water deficit (1-3). These water-related changes are expected to exert dramatic impacts on the primary productivity, species composition, trophic relationships, diversity, and ecosystem functioning of natural communities (4-8), especially in arid and semiarid ecosystems (9-11). Water-related climatic changes are expected to outweigh the direct effects of increased temperatures on many natural communities (12). Despite the pervasiveness of the projected ecological impacts of changed water availability, very little is known about the factors that make some natural communities more vulnerable or resistant than others (13,14). An important step toward improving downscaled forecasts of climate change impacts on natural communities is to test explicit, theorybased predictions about the effects of altered water availability.Because water is a resource for plants, the concept of limiting resources is a potentially important principle for making successful predictions about altered water availability. Classically, "Liebig's law of the minimum" suggests that plant productivity is limited by the single resource that is in scarcest supply relative to demand (15). This theory was developed for agricultural systems, and although its simple logi...

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“…Variation among species in mean specific leaf area (SLA; leaf area/dry mass; or its inverse, termed leaf mass per unit area) has been found to correlate well with among-species variation in key physiological attributes such as leaf longevity (LL), water use efficiency (WUE), and relative growth rate (RGR). 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).…”

mentioning

confidence: 97%

Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community

Harrison

Gornish

Copeland

2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

133

167

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Local ecological communities represent the scale at which species coexist and share resources, and at which diversity has been experimentally shown to underlie stability, productivity, invasion resistance, and other desirable community properties. Globally, community diversity shows a mixture of increases and decreases over recent decades, and these changes have relatively seldom been linked to climatic trends. In a heterogeneous California grassland, we documented declining plant diversity from 2000 to 2014 at both the local community (5 m 2 ) and landscape (27 km 2 ) scales, across multiple functional groups and soil environments. Communities became particularly poorer in native annual forbs, which are present as small seedlings in midwinter; within native annual forbs, community composition changed toward lower representation of species with a trait indicating drought intolerance (high specific leaf area). Time series models linked diversity decline to the significant decrease in midwinter precipitation. Livestock grazing history, fire, succession, N deposition, and increases in exotic species could be ruled out as contributing causes. This finding is among the first demonstrations to our knowledge of climate-driven directional loss of species diversity in ecological communities in a natural (nonexperimental) setting. Such diversity losses, which may also foreshadow larger-scale extinctions, may be especially likely in semiarid regions that are undergoing climatic trends toward higher aridity and lower productivity.L arge-scale elevational and latitudinal range shifts, altered seasonal timing, and disrupted interactions among interdependent species are well-known consequences of recent global warming, all of which are predicted to intensify in coming decades and to be accompanied by increasing rates of global extinction (1-4). Consequences of rapid climate change for the diversity of local ecological communities are far less clear; diversity might increase or decrease at any given location, depending on the particular nature of climatic changes and the potential for dispersal (5-8).

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Specific leaf area responses to environmental gradients through space and time

Cited by 173 publications

References 43 publications

Temporal intraspecific trait variability drives responses of functional diversity to interannual aridity variation in grasslands

Temporal intraspecific trait variability drives responses of functional diversity to interannual aridity variation in grasslands

Resource colimitation governs plant community responses to altered precipitation

Climate-driven diversity loss in a grassland community

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