4.6 Article

Chemical Similarity of Co-occurring Trees Decreases With Precipitation and Temperature in North American Forests

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出版社

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA
DOI: 10.3389/fevo.2021.679638

关键词

metabolomics; chemical ecology; ForestGEO; species diversity gradient; climate; biotic interactions; functional traits; temperate forest

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资金

  1. Corteva Agrisciences grant
  2. University of Texas at Austin
  3. Smithsonian ForestGEO
  4. Utah State University
  5. Utah Agricultural Experiment Station
  6. National Science Foundation
  7. Ecology Center at Utah State University
  8. USDA McIntire-Stennis Grant
  9. Edwin S. George Reserve Fund at the University of Michigan
  10. International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES) at Washington University in St. Louis
  11. National Science Foundation [1557094]
  12. Tyson Research Center
  13. Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
  14. ForestGEO Research Grants Program
  15. Washington University Environmental Studies Grant
  16. Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Discovery Grants program
  17. Global Water Futures project Northern Water Futures
  18. Canada Foundation for Innovation,
  19. Canada Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences
  20. Northern Student Training Program
  21. Smithsonian ForestGEO program
  22. ForestGEO
  23. Smithsonian Institution
  24. HSBC Climate Partnership
  25. Division Of Environmental Biology
  26. Direct For Biological Sciences [1557094] Funding Source: National Science Foundation

向作者/读者索取更多资源

Plant diversity varies greatly across global and regional temperature, precipitation, and seasonality gradients. Biotic interactions may become stronger in wetter and warmer environments, leading to greater plant species richness. Chemical similarity of co-occurring species decreases with increasing temperature and precipitation, while metabolite richness increases with temperature.
Plant diversity varies immensely over large-scale gradients in temperature, precipitation, and seasonality at global and regional scales. This relationship may be driven in part by climatic variation in the relative importance of abiotic and biotic interactions to the diversity and composition of plant communities. In particular, biotic interactions may become stronger and more host specific with increasing precipitation and temperature, resulting in greater plant species richness in wetter and warmer environments. This hypothesis predicts that the many defensive compounds found in plants' metabolomes should increase in richness and decrease in interspecific similarity with precipitation, temperature, and plant diversity. To test this prediction, we compared patterns of chemical and morphological trait diversity of 140 woody plant species among seven temperate forests in North America representing 16.2 degrees C variation in mean annual temperature (MAT), 2,115 mm variation in mean annual precipitation (MAP), and from 10 to 68 co-occurring species. We used untargeted metabolomics methods based on data generated with liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry to identify, classify, and compare 13,480 unique foliar metabolites and to quantify the metabolomic similarity of species in each community with respect to the whole metabolome and each of five broad classes of metabolites. In addition, we compiled morphological trait data from existing databases and field surveys for three commonly measured traits (specific leaf area [SLA], wood density, and seed mass) for comparison with foliar metabolomes. We found that chemical defense strategies and growth and allocation strategies reflected by these traits largely represented orthogonal axes of variation. In addition, functional dispersion of SLA increased with MAP, whereas functional richness of wood density and seed mass increased with MAT. In contrast, chemical similarity of co-occurring species decreased with both MAT and MAP, and metabolite richness increased with MAT. Variation in metabolite richness among communities was positively correlated with species richness, but variation in mean chemical similarity was not. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that plant metabolomes play a more important role in community assembly in wetter and warmer climates, even at temperate latitudes, and suggest that metabolomic traits can provide unique insight to studies of trait-based community assembly.

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