4.7 Article

Divergent long- and short-term responses to environmental gradients in specific leaf area of grassland species

期刊

ECOLOGICAL INDICATORS
卷 130, 期 -, 页码 -

出版社

ELSEVIER
DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolind.2021.108058

关键词

Acclimation; Adaptation; Grassland; Environmental gradient; Resource limitation; Specific leaf area

资金

  1. National Key R&D Program of China [2017YFA0604803, 2019QZKK060603]
  2. National Natural Science Foundation of China [31870437, 31872683, 41571055]
  3. Strategic Priority Research Programm of the Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDA23080401, XDA26040305]
  4. Youth Innovation Research Team Project [LENOM2016Q0005]

向作者/读者索取更多资源

Specific leaf area (SLA) is a widely studied plant trait that reflects plant resource acquisition strategies. Despite consistent variation in SLA across different plateaus, short-term manipulative experiments showed that SLA increases with resource availability, suggesting an important strategy for grassland species in coping with ongoing shifts in climate.
Specific leaf area (SLA) is one of the most widely researched plant traits, integrating multiple functions and reflecting plant resource acquisition strategies. However, the underlying mechanisms that drive temporal and spatial variation in SLA are still not clear. We used a combination of transect investigation and short-term manipulative experiments to identify patterns of variation in SLA over naturally occurring and simulated environmental gradients. We measured SLA of 631 species from the Tibetan (TP), Loess (LP), and Mongolian Plateaus (MP), where plant growth is limited by temperature, soil nutrient availability, and precipitation, respectively. In each plateau, we established an east-west transect of 10 sites, including meadow steppe (meadow), typical steppe (steppe), and desert steppe (desert) habitats. We further measured SLA of 15 species from the TP and MP, using manipulative experiments that altered temperature, precipitation and soil nitrogen levels. SLA ranged from 0.9 to 58.90 m2 kg-1 on average, and was significantly larger in desert than in meadow and steppe, except in the LP. Plants from the TP had significantly lower SLA than those from the LP and MP, but variation in SLA across the environmental gradients was small and consistent across the three plateaus. Conversely, the short-term manipulative experiments revealed that SLA increased with resource availability. Shifts in SLA across the broad environmental gradients was relatively small, and SLA had high sensitivity to short-term resource enrichment, suggesting that grassland species in these plateaus express divergent short(acclimation) and long-term responses (adaptation) to the environment, which may be an important strategy for coping with ongoing shifts in climate.

作者

我是这篇论文的作者
点击您的名字以认领此论文并将其添加到您的个人资料中。

评论

主要评分

4.7
评分不足

次要评分

新颖性
-
重要性
-
科学严谨性
-
评价这篇论文

推荐

暂无数据
暂无数据