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Within-species trade-offs in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity and growth, flowering, and seed size.

ABSTRACT: Soil microbial communities affect species demographic rates of plants. In turn, plants influence the composition and function of the soil microbiome, potentially resulting in beneficial feedbacks that alter their fitness and establishment. For example, differences in the ability to stimulate soil enzyme activity among plant lineages may affect plant growth and reproduction. We used a common garden study to test differences in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity between lineages of the same species across developmental stages. Lineages employed different strategies whereby growth, days to flowering and seed size traded-off with plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity. Specifically, the smaller seeded lineage stimulated more enzyme activity at the early stage of development and flowered earlier while the larger seeded lineage sustained lower but consistent enzyme activity through development. We suggest that these lineages, which are both successful invaders, employ distinct strategies (a colonizer and a competitor) and differ in their influence on soil microbial activity. Synthesis. The ability to influence the soil microbial community by plants may be an important trait that trades off with growth, flowering, and seed size for promoting plant establishment, reproduction, and invasion.

SUBMITTER: Gomola CE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6303770 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Within-species trade-offs in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity and growth, flowering, and seed size.

Gomola Courtney E CE McKay John K JK Wallenstein Matthew D MD Wagg Cameron C O'Brien Michael J MJ

Ecology and evolution 20181031 23

Soil microbial communities affect species demographic rates of plants. In turn, plants influence the composition and function of the soil microbiome, potentially resulting in beneficial feedbacks that alter their fitness and establishment. For example, differences in the ability to stimulate soil enzyme activity among plant lineages may affect plant growth and reproduction. We used a common garden study to test differences in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity between lineages of the same spe ...[more]

PMID: 30598769

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Project description:In the pineapple sector of Benin, poor fruit quality prevents pineapple producers to enter the European market. We investigated effects of common cultural practices, flowering and maturity synchronisation, (1) to quantify the trade-offs of flowering and maturity synchronisation for pineapple quality and the proportion of fruits exportable to European markets, and (2) to determine the effect of harvesting practice on quality attributes. Four on-farm experiments were conducted during three years using cultivars Sugarloaf and Smooth Cayenne. A split-split plot design was used in each experiment, with flowering induction practice as main factor (artificial or natural flowering induction), maturity induction practice as split factor (artificial or natural maturity induction) and harvesting practice as the split-split factor (farmers' harvest practice or individual fruit harvesting at optimum maturity). Artificial flowering induction gave fruits with lower infructescence weight, higher ratio crown: infructescence length, and a lower proportion of fruits exportable to European markets than natural flowering induction. The costs of the improvements by natural flowering induction were huge: the longer durations from planting to flowering induction and harvesting, the higher number of harvestings of the fruits increasing the labour cost and the lower proportion of plants producing fruits compared with crops from artificially flowering-induced plants. Artificial maturity induction decreased the total soluble solids concentration in the fruits compared with natural maturity induction thus decreasing the proportion of fruits exportable to European markets, at a benefit of only a slightly shorter time from flowering induction to harvesting. Harvesting individual fruits at optimum maturity gave fruits with higher total soluble solids in naturally maturity induced fruits compared with the farmers' harvest practice. Given the huge costs of natural flowering induction, options to use artificial flowering induction effectively for obtaining high fruit quality are discussed.

Project description:Background and aimsWhile the 'worldwide leaf economics spectrum' (Wright IJ, Reich PB, Westoby M, et al. 2004. The worldwide leaf economics spectrum. Nature : 821-827) defines mineral nutrient relationships in plants, no unifying functional consensus links size attributes. Here, the focus is upon leaf size, a much-studied plant trait that scales positively with habitat quality and components of plant size. The objective is to show that this wide range of relationships is explicable in terms of a seed-phytomer-leaf (SPL) theoretical model defining leaf size in terms of trade-offs involving the size, growth rate and number of the building blocks (phytomers) of which the young shoot is constructed.MethodsFunctional data for 2400+ species and English and Spanish vegetation surveys were used to explore interrelationships between leaf area, leaf width, canopy height, seed mass and leaf dry matter content (LDMC).Key resultsLeaf area was a consistent function of canopy height, LDMC and seed mass. Additionally, size traits are partially uncoupled. First, broad laminas help confer competitive exclusion while morphologically large leaves can, through dissection, be functionally small. Secondly, leaf size scales positively with plant size but many of the largest-leaved species are of medium height with basally supported leaves. Thirdly, photosynthetic stems may represent a functionally viable alternative to 'small seeds + large leaves' in disturbed, fertile habitats and 'large seeds + small leaves' in infertile ones.ConclusionsAlthough key elements defining the juvenile growth phase remain unmeasured, our results broadly support SPL theory in that phytometer and leaf size are a product of the size of the initial shoot meristem (≅ seed mass) and the duration and quality of juvenile growth. These allometrically constrained traits combine to confer ecological specialization on individual species. Equally, they appear conservatively expressed within major taxa. Thus, 'evolutionary canalization' sensu Stebbins (Stebbins GL. 1974. Flowering plants: evolution above the species level . Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press) is perhaps associated with both seed and leaf development, and major taxa appear routinely specialized with respect to ecologically important size-related traits.

Dataset Information

Within-species trade-offs in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity and growth, flowering, and seed size.

Publications

Within-species trade-offs in plant-stimulated soil enzyme activity and growth, flowering, and seed size.

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