Plant-available soil nutrients have a limited influence on cone production patterns of individual white spruce trees
- PDF / 1,161,645 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 25 Downloads / 130 Views
POPULATION ECOLOGY – ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Plant‑available soil nutrients have a limited influence on cone production patterns of individual white spruce trees Abigail C. Leeper1 · Beth A. Lawrence2 · Jalene M. LaMontagne1 Received: 2 October 2019 / Accepted: 15 September 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The resource budget model for mast seeding hypothesizes that soil nutrients proximately influence reproduction. Plants in high soil nutrient (particularly N) areas are predicted to have lower reproductive variability over time and higher mean reproduction. While often examined theoretically, there are relatively few empirical tests of this hypothesis. We quantified cone production of 110 individual white spruce (Picea glauca) trees over seven years and quantified plant-available soil macronutrients (N, Ca, K, Mg, P, S) in natural forest conditions across three years with different cone crop conditions. Each of these plant-available soil nutrients were correlated across years (rs = 0.55–0.89; all > 0.81 for total-N); spatially, total-N availability varied 366-fold across trees. Plant-available soil nutrients did not influence variability or mean annual reproduction, contrary to nutrient perturbation experiments. We examined within-year nutrient and cone-production relationships, and observed significant positive relationships between reproduction and plant-available soil nutrients only in a low-reproduction year preceding a mast event. Both during a mast event and the following year, when overall cone production was very high or very low, there were no relationships. Both external drivers (e.g., weather) and internal resource budgets likely influence soil nutrient-reproduction relationships. These results suggest that plant-available soil nutrients may not be a large factor influencing mast-seeding patterns among individuals in this species. Keywords Mast seeding · Nitrogen · Nutrient availability · Reproduction · Resource budget
Introduction Mast seeding is the synchronous production of highly variable seed crops over time by a population of perennial plants (Janzen 1971; Kelly 1994). This reproductive strategy is common in numerous species of deciduous and coniferous trees, grasses, and herbaceous plants in habitats across the Communicated by Katherine L Gross. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-020-04759-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Abigail C. Leeper [email protected] 1
Department of Biological Sciences, DePaul University, 2325 N. Clifton Ave., Chicago, IL, USA
Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, Center for Environmental Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut, 1376 Storrs Road, Storrs, CT 06269, USA
2
world (Sork et al. 1993; Pearse et al. 2017). The predominant evolutionary hypotheses to explain this phenomenon are to increase pollination efficiency (Kelly and Sork 2002) or satiate seed predators (Janzen 1971;
Data Loading...
