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Fast and furious: Early differences in growth rate drive short-term plant dominance and exclusion under eutrophication.

ABSTRACT: The reduction of plant diversity following eutrophication threatens many ecosystems worldwide. Yet, the mechanisms by which species are lost following nutrient enrichment are still not completely understood, nor are the details of when such mechanisms act during the growing season, which hampers understanding and the development of mitigation strategies.Using a common garden competition experiment, we found that early-season differences in growth rates among five perennial grass species measured in monoculture predicted short-term competitive dominance in pairwise combinations and that the proportion of variance explained was particularly greater under a fertilization treatment.We also examined the role of early-season growth rate in determining the outcome of competition along an experimental nutrient gradient in an alpine meadow. Early differences in growth rate between species predicted short-term competitive dominance under both ambient and fertilized conditions and competitive exclusion under fertilized conditions.The results of these two studies suggest that plant species growing faster during the early stage of the growing season gain a competitive advantage over species that initially grow more slowly, and that this advantage is magnified under fertilization. This finding is consistent with the theory of asymmetric competition for light in which fast-growing species can intercept incident light and hence outcompete and exclude slower-growing (and hence shorter) species. We predict that the current chronic nutrient inputs into many terrestrial ecosystems worldwide will reduce plant diversity and maintain a low biodiversity state by continuously favoring fast-growing species. Biodiversity management strategies should focus on controlling nutrient inputs and reducing the growth of fast-growing species early in the season.

SUBMITTER: Zhang P

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7520198 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Fast and furious: Early differences in growth rate drive short-term plant dominance and exclusion under eutrophication.

Zhang Pengfei P Hefting Mariet M MM Soons Merel B MB Kowalchuk George A GA Rees Mark M Hector Andy A Turnbull Lindsay A LA Zhou Xiaolong X Guo Zhi Z Chu Chengjing C Du Guozhen G Hautier Yann Y

Ecology and evolution 20200909 18

The reduction of plant diversity following eutrophication threatens many ecosystems worldwide. Yet, the mechanisms by which species are lost following nutrient enrichment are still not completely understood, nor are the details of when such mechanisms act during the growing season, which hampers understanding and the development of mitigation strategies.Using a common garden competition experiment, we found that early-season differences in growth rates among five perennial grass species measured ...[more]

PMID: 33005368

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Project description:The language abilities of young and adult learners range from memorizing specific items to finding statistical regularities between them (item-bound generalization) and generalizing rules to novel instances (category-based generalization). Both external factors, such as input variability, and internal factors, such as cognitive limitations, have been shown to drive these abilities. However, the exact dynamics between these factors and circumstances under which rule induction emerges remain largely underspecified. Here, we extend our information-theoretic model (Radulescu et al., 2019), based on Shannon's noisy-channel coding theory, which adds into the "formula" for rule induction the crucial dimension of time: the rate of encoding information by a time-sensitive mechanism. The goal of this study is to test the channel capacity-based hypothesis of our model: if the input entropy per second is higher than the maximum rate of information transmission (bits/second), which is determined by the channel capacity, the encoding method moves gradually from item-bound generalization to a more efficient category-based generalization, so as to avoid exceeding the channel capacity. We ran two artificial grammar experiments with adults, in which we sped up the bit rate of information transmission, crucially not by an arbitrary amount but by a factor calculated using the channel capacity formula on previous data. We found that increased bit rate of information transmission in a repetition-based XXY grammar drove the tendency of learners toward category-based generalization, as predicted by our model. Conversely, we found that increased bit rate of information transmission in complex non-adjacent dependency aXb grammar impeded the item-bound generalization of the specific a_b frames, and led to poorer learning, at least judging by our accuracy assessment method. This finding could show that, since increasing the bit rate of information precipitates a change from item-bound to category-based generalization, it impedes the item-bound generalization of the specific a_b frames, and that it facilitates category-based generalization both for the intervening Xs and possibly for a/b categories. Thus, sped up bit rate does not mean that an unrestrainedly increasing bit rate drives rule induction in any context, or grammar. Rather, it is the specific dynamics between the input entropy and the maximum rate of information transmission.

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Fast and furious: Early differences in growth rate drive short-term plant dominance and exclusion under eutrophication.

Publications

Fast and furious: Early differences in growth rate drive short-term plant dominance and exclusion under eutrophication.

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