Young clonal and non-clonal herbs differ in growth strategy but not in aboveground biomass compensation after disturbanc
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COMMUNITY ECOLOGY – ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Young clonal and non‑clonal herbs differ in growth strategy but not in aboveground biomass compensation after disturbance Jana Martínková1 · Adam Klimeš1,2 · Jitka Klimešová1,2 Received: 30 January 2020 / Accepted: 29 July 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Clonal plants have more traits enabling individual persistence (larger belowground storage of buds and assimilates), whereas non-clonal plants have more traits enabling population persistence (a higher reliance on regeneration from seeds). This difference presumably makes those groups respond differently to disturbance. We asked whether this difference is already expressed in the first year of the plant’s life. In a pot experiment with 17 congeneric pairs of clonal and non-clonal herbs, we investigated response to a disturbance at the individual level. We were interested whether the leaf C/N ratio (a proxy reflecting active growth and photosynthetic efficiency), the R/S ratio (a proxy for belowground storage) and the amount of compensated biomass differ between clonal and non-clonal herbs. Moreover, we asked whether compensation for the loss of aboveground biomass after disturbance can be predicted by the R/S ratio or explained by the leaf C/N ratio. We found that clonal herbs have higher leaf C/N and R/S ratios than non-clonal herbs. Under disturbance, the leaf C/N and R/S ratios decreased in the clonal herbs and increased in the non-clonal herbs. However, the clonal and non-clonal plants did not differ in biomass compensation ability. Neither the R/S ratio nor the leaf C/N ratio explained the compensation abilities of the herbs. These results show that even though the growth strategies of clonal and non-clonal plants and their reactions to disturbance are different, the groups are similarly capable of compensating for the loss of aboveground biomass. Clonal plants do not have an advantage over non-clonal plants under disturbance during their first year of life. Keywords Bud · C/N ratio · Growth · R/S ratio · Strategy
Introduction Among perennial herbs, clonal and non-clonal species represent distinct reproductive strategies and body architectures (Harper 1977; Klimeš et al. 1997; Klimešová et al. 2018a, b). While clonal herbs invest more into vegetative than generative reproduction and their populations rely on genetically identical vegetative offspring rather than on seedlings, non-clonal herbs use the opposite strategy predominantly (Silvertown et al. 1993; Herben et al. 2015). Non-clonal Communicated by Yu-Long Feng. * Jana Martínková [email protected] 1
Department of Experimental and Functional Morphology, Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Dukelská 135, 379 82 Třeboň, Czech Republic
Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, Charles University, Benátská 2, CZ‑128 01 Praha 2, Czech Republic
2
herbs invest in seeds and genetically variable progeny (Grime 1979). Vegetative multiplication of clonal herbs is allowed by the production of con
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