Can Dominant Canopy Species Leaf Litter Determine Soil Nutrient Heterogeneity? A Case Study in a Tropical Rainforest in
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Can Dominant Canopy Species Leaf Litter Determine Soil Nutrient Heterogeneity? A Case Study in a Tropical Rainforest in Southwest China Anjana J. Atapattu 1,2,3,4 Xiaodong Yang 1,2
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Shang-wen Xia 1,2
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Min Cao 1,2 & Wen-fu Zhang 1,2 & Sandhya Mishra 1,2
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Received: 7 April 2020 / Accepted: 30 July 2020 # Sociedad Chilena de la Ciencia del Suelo 2020
Abstract Litterfall significantly contributes to the fine-scale (defined here as < 1 ha) soil nutrient heterogeneity in the tropical forest ecosystem. However, the relationship between species-specific litter and spatial pattern of soil nutrients remains unclear. Therefore, our main aim is to test the hypothesis that dominant species-specific leaf litter contributes significantly to the fine-scale soil nutrient heterogeneity. In a Parashorea chinensis–dominated tropical rainforest in Southwest China, we selected a 1-ha plot, conducted intensive soil sampling (99 ha−1), litter trapping (99 ha−1), and top 5 species’ leaf litter sorting. We then analyzed the spatial variation patterns and correlations of soil nutrients with top 5 species litter nutrient fluxes using scale-wise wavelet analysis. Our results suggested that the fine-scale spatial variability of soil nutrients was not influenced by nutrient fluxes of dominant species leaf litter, whereas total litterfall nutrient fluxes depicted clear correlations with soil nutrients in studied forest and scale. This study did not detect the signature of dominant tree species-specific leaf litter on the fine-scale soil nutrient heterogeneity. In contrast, total litterfall distinctly modified soil nutrient heterogeneity at fine-scale. Our results highlight the potential importance of whole community litter and non-leaf litter on the regulation and maintenance of fine-scale soil nutrient heterogeneity in hyper-diverse tropical rainforests. Keywords Leaf litter . Soil nutrient heterogeneity . Fine-scale . Dominant species . Tropical rainforest
1 Introduction Soil nutrient heterogeneity is important in structuring the plant community, altering species distribution pattern, functioning Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s42729-020-00314-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Shang-wen Xia [email protected] * Xiaodong Yang [email protected] 1
CAS Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xishuangbanna 666303, China
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Plant Ecology, Core Botanical Gardens, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xishuangbanna 666303, China
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University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
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Agronomy Division, Coconut Research Institute, Lunuwila 61150, Sri Lanka
of ecosystems, and maintaining biodiversity (Janssens et al. 1998; Day et al. 2003; Wijesinghe et al. 2005; Tylianakis et al. 2008; García-Palacios et al. 2010; Xia et al. 2019). Soil nutrient heterogeneity is a scale-dependent phenomenon (Davies et al. 2005) and can be driven by many bioti
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