Seedlings of alpine species do not have better frost-tolerance than their lowland counterparts
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Seedlings of alpine species do not have better frost‑tolerance than their lowland counterparts Sergey Rosbakh1 · Vera Margreiter2 · Bernardica Jelcic1,3 Received: 9 March 2020 / Accepted: 13 June 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In contrast to adult plants, little is known about the frost-tolerance of seedlings of alpine species, despite the fact that frost has been considered as one of the main factors limiting plant recruitment in high elevation. Here we report the results of a comparative study on seedling frost-tolerance of nine congeneric species pairs with lowland (0–900 m a.s.l.) and alpine (1800–2700 m a.s.l.) distribution. Similarly to adult alpine plants, we expected seedlings of alpine species to be more frosttolerant than their lowland counterparts. Frost-tolerance was estimated under laboratory conditions by exposing seedlings to frost events from − 1 to − 9 °C, calculated as the temperature at which 50% of the seedlings were lethally damaged by frost (LT50). The L T50 values varied between − 1.95 and − 6.11 °C suggesting that seedling of all tested species could potentially survive mild and/or short frosts, but might be lethally damaged by severe and/or continuous frost events. The LT50 values for lowland and alpine species did not differ statistically and were on average − 3.96 ± 0.18 °C and − 4.16 ± 0.43 °C, respectively. These findings did not confirm our hypothesis that seedlings of alpine species have higher frost-tolerance than seedlings of lowland species. Four possible reasons could explain this pattern. They include (1) comparable levels of negative-stress in both lowland and alpine habitats, (2) opportunistic seed germination strategy in alpine plants, (3) peculiarities of our experimental set up and (4) potentially stronger effects of drought on alpine seedling survival than frost. Keywords Alps · Freezing · Frost tolerance · Lowland · Seedling
Introduction Harsh climatic conditions in alpine environments can negatively affect the sexual reproduction success in plants of those habitats (Sakai and Larcher 1987; Körner 1999). Short growing seasons with low temperatures coupled with frequent frost events limit growth and regeneration in all plant life stages, from gametophyte development to seedlings and Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00035-020-00237-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Sergey Rosbakh [email protected] 1
Chair of Ecology and Conservation Biology, University of Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
2
Department of Botany, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria
3
Department of Plant Nutrition, Faculty of Agriculture, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
adult plants (Körner 1999). Plants´ exposure to sub-zero temperatures, even for short periods, can result in damages of generative organs (Larcher and Wagner 2004), considerable reduction in fruit production (Inouye 2008; Gerdol et al. 2013) or complete crop failure, and se
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