covariation in plant functional traits and soil fertility within two species-rich forests共变在植物功能性状在两品种丰富的森林和土壤肥力.pdfVIP

Covariation in Plant Functional Traits and Soil Fertility within Two Species-Rich Forests 1,5 2 3 4 1 1 Xiaojuan Liu , Nathan G. Swenson , S. Joseph Wright , Liwen Zhang , Kai Song , Yanjun Du , 1 1 1 1 Jinlong Zhang , Xiangcheng Mi , Haibao Ren , Keping Ma * 1 State Key Laboratory of Vegetation and Environmental Change, Institute of Botany, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xiangshan, Beijing, China, 2 Department of Plant Biology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America, 3 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Balboa, Panama, 4 Yantai Institute of Coastal Zone Research, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yantai, Shandong, China, 5 Graduate University of The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China Abstract The distribution of plant species along environmental gradients is expected to be predictable based on organismal function. Plant functional trait research has shown that trait values generally vary predictably along broad-scale climatic and soil gradients. This work has also demonstrated that at any one point along these gradients there is a large amount of interspecific trait variation. The present research proposes that this variation may be explained by the local-scale sorting of traits along soil fertility and acidity axes. Specifically, we predicted that trait values associated with high resource acquisition and growth rates would be found on soils that are more fertile and less acidic. We tested the expected relationships at the species-level and quadrat-level (20 620 m) using two large forest plots in Panama and China that contain over 450 species combined. Pre