Abundance-weighted plant functional trait variation differs between terrestrial and wetland habitats along wide climatic
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undance-weighted plant functional trait variation differs between terrestrial and wetland habitats along wide climatic gradients Yu-Kun Hu 1
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, Guo-Fang Liu , Xu Pan , Yao-Bin Song , Ming Dong 4 Johannes H. C. Cornelissen
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Key Laboratory of Hangzhou City for Ecosystem Protection and Restoration, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou 311121, China; State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100093, China; 3 Beijing Key Laboratory of Wetland Services and Restoration, Institute of Wetland Research, Chinese Academy of Forestry,
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Beijing 100091, China; Systems Ecology, Department of Ecological Science, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, the Netherlands Received May 10, 2020; accepted July 12, 2020; published online September 21, 2020
Patterns of plant trait variation across spatial scales are important for understanding ecosystem functioning and services. However, habitat-related drivers of these patterns are poorly understood. In a conceptual model, we ask whether and how the patterns of within- and among-site plant trait variation are driven by habitat type (terrestrial vs. wetland) across large climatic gradients. We tested these through spatial-hierarchical-sampling of leaves in herbaceous-dominated terrestrial and wetland communities within each of 26 sites across China. For all 13 plant traits, within-site variation was larger than among-site variation in both terrestrial and wetland habitats. Within-site variation was similar in most leaf traits related to carbon and nutrient economics but larger in specific leaf area and size-related traits (plant height, leaf area and thickness) in wetland compared to terrestrial habitats. Among-site variation was larger in terrestrial than wetland habitats for 10 leaf traits but smaller for plant height, leaf area and leaf nitrogen. Our results indicate the important role of local ecological processes in driving plant trait variation among coexisting species and the dependence of functional variation across habitats on traits considered. These findings will help to understand and predict the effects of climatic or land-use changes on ecosystem functioning and services. community-weighted mean (CWM), functional biogeography, functional diversity, leaf economic traits, size-related traits, spatial scale, wetlands Citation:
Hu, Y.K., Liu, G.F., Pan, X., Song, Y.B., Dong, M., and Cornelissen, J.H.C. (2020). Abundance-weighted plant functional trait variation differs between terrestrial and wetland habitats along wide climatic gradients. Sci China Life Sci 63, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11427-020-1766-1
INTRODUCTION Trait-based approaches have become the Holy Grail to improve our understanding and predictive power of vegetation composition and function and ecological processes (Funk et al., 2017). Plant functional traits are the morphological, *Corresponding authors (Yaobin Song, email: [email protected]
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