Institut für Landschafts- und Pflanzenökologie

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hohpublica.uni-hohenheim.de/handle/123456789/11

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Increases in functional diversity of mountain plant communities is mainly driven by species turnover under climate change
(2023) Schuchardt, Max A.; Berauer, Bernd J.; Duc, Anh Le; Ingrisch, Johannes; Niu, Yujie; Bahn, Michael; Jentsch, Anke
Warming in mountain regions is projected to be three times faster than the global average. Pronounced climate change will likely lead to species reshuffling in mountain plant communities and consequently change ecosystem resilience and functioning. Yet, little is known about the role of inter‐ versus intraspecific changes of plant traits and their consequences for functional richness and evenness of mountain plant communities under climate change. We performed a downslope translocation experiment of intact plant‐soil mesocosms from an alpine pasture and a subalpine grassland in the Swiss and Austrian Alps to simulate an abrupt shift in climate and removal of dispersal barriers. Translocated plant communities experienced warmer and dryer climatic conditions. We found a considerable shift from resource conservative to resource acquisitive leaf‐economy in the two climate change scenarios. However, shifts in leaf‐economy were mainly attributable to species turnover, namely colonization by novel lowland species with trait expressions for a wider range of resource use. We also found an increase in vegetative height of the warmed and drought‐affected alpine plant community, while trait plasticity to warming and drought was limited to few graminoid species of the subalpine plant community. Our results highlight the contrast between the strong competitive potential of novel lowland species in quickly occupying available niche space and native species' lack of both the intraspecific trait variability and the plant functional trait expressions needed to increase functional richness under warming and drought. This is particularly important for the trailing range of many mountain species (i.e. subalpine zone) where upward moving lowland species are becoming more abundant and abiotic climate stressors are likely to become more frequent in the near future. Our study emphasizes mountain plant communities' vulnerability to novel climates and biotic interactions under climate change and highlights graminoid species as potential winners of a warmer and dryer future. Keywords: alpine grassland, functional diversity, invasion, species turnover, traitspace, translocation
The need to decipher plant drought stress along the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum
(2023) Schweiger, Andreas H.; Zimmermann, Telse; Poll, Christian; Marhan, Sven; Leyrer, Vinzent; Berauer, Bernd J.
Lacking comparability among rainfall manipulation studies is still a major limiting factor for generalizations in ecological climate change impact research. A common framework for studying ecological drought effects is urgently needed to foster advances in ecological understanding the effects of drought. In this study, we argue, that the soil–plant–atmosphere‐continuum (SPAC), describing the flow of water from the soil through the plant to the atmosphere, can serve as a holistic concept of drought in rainfall manipulation experiments which allows for the reconciliation experimental drought ecology. Using experimental data, we show that investigations of leaf water potential in combination with edaphic and atmospheric drought – as the three main components of the SPAC – are key to understand the effect of drought on plants. Based on a systematic literature survey, we show that especially plant and atmospheric based drought quantifications are strongly underrepresented and integrative assessments of all three components are almost absent in current experimental literature. Based on our observations we argue, that studying dynamics of plant water status in the framework of the SPAC can foster comparability of different studies conducted in different ecosystems and with different plant species and can facilitate extrapolation to other systems, species or future climates.
The role of maternal environment and dispersal ability in plants' transgenerational plasticity
(2023) Lukić, Nataša; Zhu, Jinlei; Schurr, Frank M.; Walter, Julia
Transgenerational effects enable the transmission of environmental cues from parents to offspring. Adaptive maternal effects are expected to evolve if the maternal (or parental) environment contains information about the environment experienced by offspring. This correlation between maternal and offspring environments should be strongest in plant species with reduced dispersal ability. However, studies relating dispersal ability to the strength of maternal effects are rare. This study aimed to explore whether and how the dispersal distance of species and individuals affects offspring plant performance. Using seven common European plant species, we conducted a multi‐year common garden experiment exposing maternal plants to three different water conditions (mesic, drought and waterlogging). At the end of the season in the first year, seed heads were collected from the lower and upper parts of each mother plant and used for dispersal distance calculation. Offspring coming from the maternal lower and upper parts were exposed to the same water treatments as mothers. Contrasting our hypothesis, we found that maternal water experience and species' dispersal abilities did not influence offspring performance (plant aboveground, belowground, reproductive and dead biomass). We did not detect maternal effects, meaning that offspring plants with the same water conditions as their mothers had the same fitness as offspring with different water conditions. However, opposite to our expectations, the longer dispersal distance of individual seeds ensured a stronger maternal effect when exposed to the same water stress as their mothers. Consequently, a stressful environment would select for long‐distance dispersal.

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