Coupling spectral and resource-use complementarity in experimental grassland and forest communities.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Schweiger AK
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8437019 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:BackgroundAlthough plant diversity is postulated to resist invasion, studies have not provided consistent results, most of which were ascribed to the influences of other covariate environmental factors.Methodology/principal findingsTo explore the mechanisms by which plant diversity influences community invasibility, an experiment was conducted involving grassland sites varying in their species richness (one, two, four, eight, and sixteen species). Light interception efficiency and soil resources (total N, total P, and water content) were measured. The number of species, biomass, and the number of seedlings of the invading species decreased significantly with species richness. The presence of Patrinia scabiosaefolia Fisch. ex Trev. and Mosla dianthera (Buch.-Ham. ex Roxburgh) Maxim. significantly increased the resistance of the communities to invasion. A structural equation model showed that the richness of planted species had no direct and significant effect on invasion. Light interception efficiency had a negative effect on the invasion whereas soil water content had a positive effect. In monocultures, Antenoron filiforme (Thunb.) Rob. et Vaut. showed the highest light interception efficiency and P. scabiosaefolia recorded the lowest soil water content. With increased planted-species richness, a greater percentage of pots showed light use efficiency higher than that of A. filiforme and a lower soil water content than that in P. scabiosaefolia.Conclusions/significanceThe results of this study suggest that plant diversity confers resistance to invasion, which is mainly ascribed to the sampling effect of particular species and the complementarity effect among species on resources use.
| S-EPMC4640883 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundOver the past two decades many studies have demonstrated that plant species diversity promotes primary productivity and stability in grassland ecosystems. Additionally, soil community characteristics have also been shown to influence the productivity and composition of plant communities, yet little is known about whether soil communities also play a role in stabilizing the productivity of an ecosystem.Methodology/principal findingsHere we use microcosms to assess the effects of the presence of soil communities on plant community dynamics and stability over a one-year time span. Microcosms were filled with sterilized soil and inoculated with either unaltered field soil or field soil sterilized to eliminate the naturally occurring soil biota. Eliminating the naturally occurring soil biota not only resulted in lower plant productivity, and reduced plant species diversity, and evenness, but also destabilized the net aboveground productivity of the plant communities over time, which was largely driven by changes in abundance of the dominant grass Lolium perenne. In contrast, the grass and legumes contributed more to net aboveground productivity of the plant communities in microcosms where soil biota had been inoculated. Additionally, the forbs exhibited compensatory dynamics with grasses and legumes, thus lowering temporal variation in productivity in microcosms that received the unaltered soil inocula. Overall, asynchrony among plant species was higher in microcosms where an unaltered soil community had been inoculated, which lead to higher temporal stability in community productivity.Conclusions/significanceOur results suggest that soil communities increase plant species asynchrony and stabilize plant community productivity by equalizing the performance among competing plant species through potential antagonistic and facilitative effects on individual plant species.
| S-EPMC4734741 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Poaching of forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) for ivory has decimated their populations in Central Africa. Studying elephant movement can provide insight into habitat and resource use to reveal where, when, and why they move and guide conservation efforts. We fitted 17 forest elephants with global positioning system (GPS) collars in 2015 and 2016 in the tropical forest-grassland mosaic of the Wonga Wongué Presidential Reserve (WW), Gabon. Using the location data, we quantified movement distances, home ranges, and habitat use to examine the environmental drivers of elephant movements and predict where elephants occur spatially and temporally. Forest elephants, on average, traveled 2,840 km annually and had home ranges of 713 km2, with males covering significantly larger home ranges than females. Forest elephants demonstrated both daily and seasonal movement patterns. Daily, they moved between forest and grassland at dawn and dusk. Seasonally, they spent proportionally more time in grassland than forest during the short-wet season when grasses recruit. Forest elephants also traveled faster during the short-wet season when fruit availability was greatest, likely reflecting long, direct movements to preferred fruiting tree species. Forest elephants tended to select areas with high tree and shrub density that afford cover and browse. When villages occurred in their home ranges elephants spent a disproportionate amount of time near them, particularly in the dry season, probably for access to agricultural crops and preferred habitat. Given the importance of the grassland habitat for elephants, maintenance of the forest-grassland matrix is a conservation priority in WW. Law enforcement, outreach, and education should focus on areas of potential human-elephant conflict near villages along the borders of the reserve. GPS-tracking should be extended into multi-use areas in the peripheries of protected areas to evaluate the effects of human disturbance on elephant movements and to maintain connectivity among elephant populations in Gabon.
| S-EPMC6040693 | biostudies-literature
Project description:In soil, Acidobacteria constitute on average 20% of all bacteria, are highly diverse, and are physiologically active in situ. However, their individual functions and interactions with higher taxa in soil are still unknown. Here, potential effects of land use, soil properties, plant diversity, and soil nanofauna on acidobacterial community composition were studied by cultivation-independent methods in grassland and forest soils from three different regions in Germany. The analysis of 16S rRNA gene clone libraries representing all studied soils revealed that grassland soils were dominated by subgroup Gp6 and forest soils by subgroup Gp1 Acidobacteria. The analysis of a large number of sites (n = 57) by 16S rRNA gene fingerprinting methods (terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism [T-RFLP] and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis [DGGE]) showed that Acidobacteria diversities differed between grassland and forest soils but also among the three different regions. Edaphic properties, such as pH, organic carbon, total nitrogen, C/N ratio, phosphorus, nitrate, ammonium, soil moisture, soil temperature, and soil respiration, had an impact on community composition as assessed by fingerprinting. However, interrelations with environmental parameters among subgroup terminal restriction fragments (T-RFs) differed significantly, e.g., different Gp1 T-RFs correlated positively or negatively with nitrogen content. Novel significant correlations of Acidobacteria subpopulations (i.e., individual populations within subgroups) with soil nanofauna and vascular plant diversity were revealed only by analysis of clone sequences. Thus, for detecting novel interrelations of environmental parameters with Acidobacteria, individual populations within subgroups have to be considered.
| S-EPMC3457104 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Human occupation is usually associated with degraded landscapes but 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia's coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. This is particularly the case over the last 6,000 years when intensified intertidal shellfish usage resulted in the accumulation of substantial shell middens. We show that soils at habitation sites are higher in calcium and phosphorous. Both of these are limiting factors in coastal temperate rainforests. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) trees growing on the middens were found to be taller, have higher wood calcium, greater radial growth and exhibit less top die-back. Coastal British Columbia is the first known example of long-term intertidal resource use enhancing forest productivity and we expect this pattern to occur at archaeological sites along coastlines globally.
| S-EPMC5013557 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Artificial light at night (ALAN) affects many areas of the world and is increasing globally. To date, there has been limited and inconsistent evidence regarding the consequences of ALAN for plant communities, as well as for the fitness of their constituent species. ALAN could be beneficial for plants as they need light as energy source, but they also need darkness for regeneration and growth. We created model communities composed of 16 plant species sown, exposed to a gradient of ALAN ranging from 'moonlight only' to conditions like situations typically found directly underneath a streetlamp. We measured plant community composition and its production (biomass), as well as functional traits of three plant species from different functional groups (grasses, herbs, legumes) in two separate harvests. We found that biomass was reduced by 33% in the highest ALAN treatment compared to the control, Shannon diversity decreased by 43% and evenness by 34% in the first harvest. Some species failed to establish in the second harvest. Specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content and leaf hairiness responded to ALAN. These responses suggest that plant communities will be sensitive to increasing ALAN, and they flag a need for plant conservation activities that consider impending ALAN scenarios. This article is part of the theme issue 'Light pollution in complex ecological systems'.
| S-EPMC10613542 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Because the frequency of heterospecific interactions inevitably increases with species richness in a community, biodiversity effects must be expressed by such interactions. However, little is understood how heterospecific interactions affect ecosystem productivity because rarely are biodiversity ecosystem functioning experiments spatially explicitly manipulated. To test the effect of heterospecific interactions on productivity, direct evidence of heterospecific neighborhood interaction is needed. In this study we conducted experiments with a detailed spatial design to investigate whether and how heterospecific neighborhood interactions promote primary productivity in a grassland community. The results showed that increasing the heterospecific: conspecific contact ratio significantly increased productivity. We found there was a significant difference in the variation in plant height between monoculture and mixture communities, suggesting that height-asymmetric competition for light plays a central role in promoting productivity. Heterospecific interactions make tall plants grow taller and short plants become smaller in mixtures compared to monocultures, thereby increasing the efficiency of light interception and utilization. Overyielding in the mixture communities arises from the fact that the loss in the growth of short plants is compensated by the increased growth of tall plants. The positive correlation between species richness and primary production was strengthened by increasing the frequency of heterospecific interactions. We conclude that species richness significantly promotes primary ecosystem production through heterospecific neighborhood interactions.
| S-EPMC4211843 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Sustainable forest conservation strategies should be based on local as well as landscape-scale forest resource use data. Using ecological and sociological techniques, we test the hypotheses that (1) forest resource use differs between ethnic and socioeconomic indigenous groups and (2) that this difference results in differing spatial patterns of resource use, with implications for forest diversity and for conservation planning. In the North Rupununi Guyana, three adjacent indigenous communities (differing in their indigenous/immigrant balance) were recorded using 73 animal and 164 plant species (plus several unidentified ethno-species). Farm sites formed important foci for most forest based activities and ex-farm sites supported similar floristic diversity to surrounding forest. Resource usage differences between communities could be attributed to socio-cultural drivers, e.g. mammal meat consumption and the use of the fruits from the palm tree A. maripa were higher in more traditional households. When extracting household construction timber, lower income groups created small scattered felling sites akin to tree fall gaps whereas higher income groups created larger gaps. Lower income (indigenous) households tended to clear larger but more contained sites for farming while mixed or non-Amerindian household tended to clear smaller but more widely dispersed farm sites. These variations resulted in different patterns of forest disturbance originating from agriculture and timber extraction.
| S-EPMC4113306 | biostudies-literature
Project description:IntroductionContinuous nitrogen deposition increases the nitrogen content of terrestrial ecosystem and affects the geochemical cycle of soil nitrogen. Forest-grassland ecotone is the interface area of forest and grassland and is sensitive to global climate change. However, the structure composition and diversity of soil microbial communities and their relationship with soil environmental factors at increasing nitrogen deposition have not been sufficiently studied in forest-grassland ecotone.MethodsIn this study, experiments were carried out with four nitrogen addition treatments (0 kgN·hm-2·a-1, 10 kgN·hm-2·a-1, 20 kgN·hm-2·a-1 and 40 kgN·hm-2·a-1) to simulate nitrogen deposition in a forest-grassland ecotone in northwest Liaoning Province, China. High-throughput sequencing and qPCR technologies were used to analyze the composition, structure, and diversity characteristics of the soil microbial communities under different levels of nitrogen addition.Results and discussionThe results showed that soil pH decreased significantly at increasing nitrogen concentrations, and the total nitrogen and ammonium nitrogen contents first increased and then decreased, which were significantly higher in the N10 treatment than in other treatments (N:0.32 ~ 0.48 g/kg; NH4+-N: 11.54 ~ 13 mg/kg). With the increase in nitrogen concentration, the net nitrogen mineralization, nitrification, and ammoniation rates decreased. The addition of nitrogen had no significant effect on the diversity and structure of the fungal community, while the diversity of the bacterial community decreased significantly at increasing nitrogen concentrations. Ascomycetes and Actinomycetes were the dominant fungal and bacterial phyla, respectively. The relative abundance of Ascomycetes was negatively correlated with total nitrogen content, while that of Actinomycetes was positively correlated with soil pH. The fungal community diversity was significantly negatively correlated with nitrate nitrogen, while the diversity of the bacterial community was significantly positively correlated with soil pH. No significant differences in the abundance of functional genes related to soil nitrogen transformations under the different treatments were observed. Overall, the distribution pattern and driving factors were different in soil microbial communities in a forest-grassland ecotone in northwest Liaoning. Our study enriches research content related to factors that affect the forest-grassland ecotone.
| S-EPMC10510407 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Estonian forest and grassland topsoil samples
| PRJEB24121 | ENA