Simplifying the protocol for the quantification of generalized soil fertility gradients in grassland community ecology
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Simplifying the protocol for the quantification of generalized soil fertility gradients in grassland community ecology Laurent Daou & Bill Shipley
Received: 19 December 2019 / Accepted: 29 September 2020 # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Abstract Aims A new method, based on the latent variable measurement model, was recently developed to quantify generalised soil fertility (FG) in grassland ecosystems; i.e. the productive capacity of a soil at a multispecific scale when non-soil variables are held constant. To predict FG values, this method uses the relative growth rates (RGR) of Festuca rubra, Trifolium pratense, Triticum aestivum and Arabidopsis thaliana grown in intact soil. We investigated three simplifications of this method; namely, (i) the use of sieved soil instead of intact cores, (ii) the use of a single measure of biomass production instead of RGR and (iii), a combination of these two modifications. Methods Using 26 grassland soils from southern Quebec (Canada), FG values were predicted for each method and compared using Pearson correlation coefficients. We also evaluated the performances of these different FG values, as well as measures of NO3−, P and K in predicting aerial net primary production (NPP) of the vegetation in these sites in a common non-soil environment.
Result The four methods had comparable and very consistent FG values and, although they were not numerically equivalent, they were equivalent in predicting natural NPP of plant communities, and these predictions were better than the direct measures of NO3−, K and P flux rates as measured by Plant Root Simulator probes. Conclusions Therefore, any of these methods could be used to assess the generalized fertility. Keywords Plant growth . Latent variable measurement model . Relative growth rate . Soil fertility assessment . Structural equations Abbreviations BLUPs best linear unbiased predictors BM biomass CWM community-weighted means FG generalized fertility LDMC leaf dry matter content RGR relative growth rate SLA specific leaf area
Responsible Editor: François Teste Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-020-04729-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. L. Daou : B. Shipley (*) Laboratoire d’Écologie Fonctionnelle Département de biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, QC J1K 2R1, Canada e-mail: [email protected]
Introduction Predicting how communities assemble, and how this process of assembly changes as a function of different environmental factors, remains a major challenge (Grime 2006; Kraft et al. 2015; Mayfield and Levine 2010). Both the CATS model (Shipley 2010; Warton et al. 2014) and
Plant Soil
the TRAITSPACE model (Laughlin and Laughlin 2013) have been shown to produce quite accurate predictions of the relative abundance of species in a local community given information on their traits and communityweighted trait means. However, in order for such models to produce accurate predictions of co
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