Abiotic Regulation: Landslide Scale and Altitude Regulate Functional Traits of Regenerating Plant Communities After Earthquakes

Abstract

Regeneration and assembly of a plant community after a large-scale natural disturbance are affected by many factors. The relative importance of abiotic factors represented by the external environment and the biological factors inside the plant community during this process is still unexplored. This work investigated the regions affected by the Wenchuan earthquake, focusing on areas with the highest intensity (XI degrees) of this earthquake, and the process of community assembly through functional traits on landslides. The aim of this study was to understand the importance of factors influencing community assembly from the perspective of functional traits. The main conclusion is presented as follows: after the regeneration of large earthquake-induced landslides, community-level functional traits covering many plant organs, such as roots, stems, leaves and seeds, are obviously different from those unaffected by landslides. Functional traits do not show strong phylogenetic conservatism. Overall, community traits are divergent or random, and the degree of divergence among the different traits varies. Species composition and alpha diversity have minimal effect on community functional traits during the process of landslide restoration. Landslide scale and altitude significantly affected community-level functional traits in the process of community assembly. All the findings suggested that the functional traits of regenerating vegetation after the earthquake changed significantly and that the functional traits depended more on abiotic regulation than on evolutionary and species-specific factors.

Multiscale Regulation of Leaf Traits in Woody Plants as an Adaptation to a Post-Earthquake Environment in Broadleaved Forests of Southwestern China

“…Meanwhile, the responses of different traits to phylogeny were also different [30]. Similarly, a previous study in this region calculated Blomberg's K-value for woody plant functional traits after the earthquake and showed that there were no significant phylogenetic signals for most of the functional traits of the woody plants on landslides [8]. Therefore, no significant consistency between traits and phylogeny was found in this region after the earthquake, which may be due to the local environmental characteristics and limited selection of traits.…”

“…Intercorrelations of functional traits are helpful to better understand the ecological strategies and evolutionary trade-offs of plants [8,24]. The differences in ecological functional strategies among different types of plants also leads to changes in the relationship between traits.…”

“…A previous study found that after 11 years of natural restoration of seismic landslides, plant functional traits at the community scale on landslides differed significantly from those on nonlandslides in the same region. This phenomenon was more pronounced in woody plants than in herbaceous plants, which may indicate that forests are more at risk from earthquakes than are grasslands [8]. Earthquakes and their secondary disasters mainly change regional topography, soil properties and water supply, which can be obviously reflected in plant functional traits [7].…”

Potential short-term effects of earthquake on the plant–soil interface in alpine grassland of the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau

“…Disturbances of varying intensities and frequencies not only influence plant diversity and spatial distributions but also affect physiological and ecological processes in plants, and serve as forces of selectivity in their composition ( Sousa, 1984 ; Lindenmayer et al., 2010 ; Loto and Bravo, 2020 ). To date, the response mechanism of vegetation after earthquake has remained a topical issue in ecology ( Huang et al., 2017 ; Kang et al., 2021 ; Kang et al., 2022 ). Community diversity as well as species richness can be significantly reduced by earthquake, leading to a decline in productivity and serious damage to grassland ecosystems ( Mittelbach et al., 2001 ; Ouyang et al., 2008 ; Zhang et al., 2011 ).…”

“…Eleven years following the Wenchuan earthquake, herbaceous communities still dominated the land recovery, and plant diversity and species evenness were still significantly reduced ( Kang et al., 2021 ). Plant functional traits at the community level that covered multiple organs of grassland plants, including seeds, leaves, stems, and roots, differed markedly compared to plants not affected by the earthquake ( Kang et al., 2022 ). However, we have not gained a clear understanding of what causes the reduction in grassland community diversity and productivity after earthquakes.…”