Coordination of leaf functional traits under climatic warming in an arid ecosystem

Abstract

Background Climatic warming is increasing regionally and globally, and results concerning warming and its consequent drought impacts have been reported extensively. However, due to a lack of quantitative analysis of warming severities, it is still unclear how warming and warming-induced drought influence leaf functional traits, particularly how the traits coordinate with each other to cope with climatic change. To address these uncertainties, we performed a field experiment with ambient, moderate and severe warming regimes in an arid ecosystem over 4 years. Results Severe warming significantly reduced the specific leaf area and net photosynthetic rate with a relatively stable change and even enhancement under moderate warming, especially showing species-specific performance. The current results largely indicate that a coordinated trade-off can exist between plant functional traits in plant communities in a dryland ecosystem under ambient temperature conditions, which is strongly amplified by moderate warming but diminished or even eliminated by severe warming. Based on the present findings and recent results in the relevant literature, we advance the ecological conceptual models (e.g., LES and CSR) in the response to climatic warming in arid grassland communities, where the few key species play a crucial role by balancing their functional performances to cope with environmental change. Conclusion Our results highlight the importance of coordination and/or trade-off between leaf functional traits for understanding patterns of climatic change-induced vegetation degradation and suggest that the plant community composition in these drylands could be shifted under future climate change.

Timely estimation of leaf chlorophyll fluorescence parameters under varying light regimes by coupling light drivers to leaf traits

“…The dynamics in the relationships are in agreement with the previous study by Pollastrini et al (2016), who reported the changing ChlF‐trait relationships across species and sites. In addition, Yu et al (2022) also found that warming changed the relationships between ChlF parameters and specific leaf area, with significance under control and moderate warming and non‐significance under severe warming. This study revealed the relationship between fluorescence and leaf traits and the changes in this relationship with light conditions, unravelling the complex dynamics of plant photosynthesis and stress responses.…”

Plant economic strategies in two contrasting forests

“…Based on PCA analysis, we found that these photosynthetic traits were convergent more in north-cold boreal forest than in high-cold alpine forest. It implies that the former would exert a joint response to local environmental change [ 88 ]. Additionally, the results from SEM were partially inconsistent with those using linear regressions in our study.…”

“…The reference CO 2 concentration in the leaf chamber was kept at 360–400 µmol CO 2 mol − 1 , with a relative air humidity of 50-70%, and saturating photosynthetic photon flux density was set at 1500 µmol·m − 2 ·s − 1 . The fully expanded youngest leaves per plant per species in each plot were placed into the cuvette, and at least three measurements were made for each species in each plot [ 88 ]. The maximum net photosynthetic rate per unit area ( A area ) was directly obtained, and the maximum net photosynthetic rate per unit mass ( A mass ) was then calculated by the equation:…”

The morphology and nutrient content drive the leaf carbon capture and economic trait variations in subtropical bamboo forest

“…Since the adjustment of leaf economic traits is deeply correlated with photosynthesis and productivity, it is necessary to quantitatively analyze the processes of leaf economic traits driven by environmental and intrinsic factors ( Li et al., 2021a ). The structural equation model has been used to quantitatively analyze the causal relationship between variables, which has been more mature in the field of plant functional trait research ( Vile et al., 2006 ; Yu et al., 2022 ). This study hypothesized that elevation drives changes in leaf morphological characteristics and nutrient content that affect photosynthesis ( Figure 2 ) as an initial model.…”