Increasing ecological multifunctionality during early plant succession

Abstract

Ecological multifunctionality quantifies the functional performance of various important plant traits and increases with growing structural habitat heterogeneity, number of plant functional traits, and species richness. However, the successional changes in multifunctionality have not been traced so far. We use quantitative plant samples of 1 m 2 plots from the first 6 years of initial vegetation dynamics in a German created catchment to infer the temporal changes in plant functional trait space and multifunctionality.Multifunctionality at the plot level was in all study years lower than expected from a random sample of the local pool of potential colonizers and was lowest at intermediate states of succession. In each year species containing a specific set of traits occurred with limited but focused functionality. The observed average low degree of multifunctionality contrasts with recent models predicting a tendency towards maximum multifunctionality during plant community development. However, variability in multifunctionality among plots increased during succession and the respective multifunctionality distribution among plots ().,-volV) ( 01234567 89().,-volV) was increasingly right skewed indicating an excess of plots with relatively high multifunctionality. This relative excess of plots with high multifunctionality might act as an important trigger of community development paving the way for new species and functions to become established.

Trait driven or neutral: understanding the change in functional trait diversity during early plant succession using Price partitions

“…To disentangle the drivers of FD during plant succession we would need to partition the major components that in uence trait expression, particularly richness and abundance effects, and their Here, we use data from long-term monitoring of early primary plant succession carried out between 2005 and 2011 in a German arti cial catchment created to study the initial hydrological processes and the development of soil and vegetation (Frouz et al 2020). In earlier work we reported already on the high small-scale variability in the pattern of species occurrences and phylogenetic community composition (Ulrich et al 2017), the steady increase in the diversity of important functional traits (Ulrich et al 2014) and the comparatively low although increasing degree in FD and multifunctionality (Winter et al 2019), the latter being the manifold of ecological ecosystem services realized in a community (Hector and Bagchi 2007;Gamfeldt and Roger 2017). Based on these studies and the above discussion we ask three basic questions.…”

Early colonization of constructed technosol by microarthropods

“…To address this, this study aimed to investigate the early colonization (the first four years) by Collembola of a constructed Technosol supporting grassland vegetation in order to shed light on the successional stages of the community in this environment. The development of vegetation on Technosol should create a mosaic of microenvironments (Winter et al, 2019). In turn, the increasing heterogeneity of the environments and niches should facilitate colonization by organisms from surrounding environments, resulting in increased Collembola diversity.…”

A false paradigm? Do biocrust types necessarily reflect ‘successional stages’?

“…Later scholars made a clear distinction between primary succession which takes place on substrates without biological legacy and secondary succession in which the biological legacy remains (Cutler, 2010;Walker et al, 2001). Primary succession may, result from deterministic (climate, soil properties) or stochastic processes that are driven by the dispersal of propagules belonging to the regional species pool; (Pickett et al, 1987;Winter et al, 2019). While fresh lava flows and active dune fields may serve as substrates for primary succession, disturbance (such as tillage and fire) may result in secondary succession.…”