Changes in diversity and importance of clonal plants during sand dune succession in northeastern China

Abstract

Many major biomes throughout the world are dominated by plants with clonal growth forms. While many recent studies have examined the effects of clonality on the growth of individual plants, relatively few studies have tested the community level effects of clonality as a function of environmental characteristics. By investigating six sand dune sites that have undergone different numbers of years of natural restoration constituting a succession sere, we quantified if the abundance and importance of clonal plants was related to successional age in the stressful environment of a semi‐arid sand dune region in northeastern China. We expected that clonal plants would dominate at every stage of the succession sere. We also predicted that species diversity would decrease in later stages of the succession sere due to the extremely high proportion of clonal plants in the community. Our results showed that, through 45 years of succession, the total plant species richness and Shannon–Wiener diversity index continually increased. While the species number of clonal plants was consistently low during the succession, the importance of clonal plants increased gradually from none at 3 years to 49 % of the total, approximately equal to that of aclonal plants, at the 45‐year site. Clonal plants with phalanx strategies were more important than guerillas at all ages in sand dune succession. At the beginning and early stages of sand dune succession, aclonal plants were more important than clonal plants, perhaps due to greater seed propagation. The distribution or arrangement of aclonal and clonal plants in the whole process of sand dune complemented each other. The results presented give new perceptions on the function of biodiversity in maintaining ecosystems.

Characteristics of soil seed banks at different geomorphic positions within the longitudinal sand dunes of the Gurbantunggut Desert, China

“…The low similarity coefficients may be attributed to the following reasons. First, the growth and development of perennial species mainly depend on their ability to colonize by means of root-derived, stem-derived and other organs-derived propagations, rather than by seed reproduction (Zhang and Zhang, 2007;Wang et al, 2010;Zhang and Wu, 2014). Second, the seed predators may reduce the seed density, thus disassociating the vegetation seeds with soil seeds (Ruano et al, 2015;Sprengelmeyer and Rebertus, 2015).…”

High correlations between plant clonality and ecosystem service functions after management in a chronosequence of evergreen conifer plantations

“…Diversity of clonal plants include richness, SW diversity index, and the proportion of clonal woody plants, clonal herbs, and all clonal plants, as well as the coverage and cover proportion of clonal herbs. These parameters were calculated by the above diversity indices and according to IV for all clonal plants in plots (Zhang and Wu, 2014). The proportion of clonal woody plants, clonal herbs, and all clonal plants was the ratio of the number of clonal woody plants, clonal herbs, and all clonal plants to the number of woody plants, herbs, and all plants.…”