A climate-driven switch in plant nitrogen acquisition within tropical forest communities.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Houlton BZ
PROVIDER: S-EPMC1885600 | biostudies-literature | 2007 May
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
A climate-driven switch in plant nitrogen acquisition within tropical forest communities.
Houlton Benjamin Z BZ Sigman Daniel M DM Schuur Edward A G EA Hedin Lars O LO
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20070514 21
The response of tropical forests to climate change will depend on individual plant species' nutritional strategies, which have not been defined in the case of the nitrogen nutrition that is critical to sustaining plant growth and photosynthesis. We used isotope natural abundances to show that a group of tropical plant species with diverse growth strategies (trees and ferns, canopy, and subcanopy) relied on a common pool of inorganic nitrogen, rather than specializing on different nitrogen pools. ...[more]
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