Integrated Screening Validates Primary Axes of Specialisation in Plants

Do Clonal and Bud Bank Traits Vary in Correspondence with Soil Properties and Resource Acquisition Strategies? Patterns in Alpine Communities in the Scandian Mountains

“…Grime et al (1997) found that traits like root and shoot foraging were associated with foliar concentrations of N, P, K, Ca and Mg, the capacity for growth in productive conditions or the inability to sustain yield under limiting supplies of nutrients. However, despite the large body of empirical work conducted in the field of comparative ecology, both in the areas of clonality/vegetative reproduction and of plant traits related to resource acquisition and competitive ability (Jónsdóttir and Watson 1997;Bellingham and Sparrow 2000;Vesk and Westoby 2004), these groups of traits determining fundamental strategies of plant in response to the environment have seldom been analyzed together with the aim of exploring common patterns of trait distributions, largely due to the time-consuming effort of collecting below-ground traits for many species (Weiher et al 1999), but see Wildová et al (2007) and Goldberg et al (2008).…”

“…Cornelissen et al 2003). Some of these traits are fair predictors of plant performance (Kazakou et al 2006), competitive ability (Grime et al 1997) and tolerance to environmental harshness (Wright and Westoby 1999). There is also the understanding that these traits correspond to adaptations of plants along gradients of resource availability, and that are related to acquisition and retention strategies (Grime et al 1997).…”

“…The expression of these relationships results from an interaction with the level of resource availability (Ferraro and Oesterheld 2002;Wise and Abrahamson 2005). For example, high tissue turnover and resource acquisition rates are important strategies for plants with high growth rates (del-Val and Crawley 2005) and occurring at high resource availability (Grime et al 1997).…”

“…In accordance with current notions, we hypothesized that the average composition of traits in a plant assemblage in terms of: i) the predominance of different clonal growth organ types, ii) the number of buds in the bud bank and iii) its readiness to be activated (i.e., meristems on shoots and distributed above ground or close to the soil surface), iv) the distance of lateral spread, would increase and v) the longevity of plant -offspring connections would decrease with better soil conditions. Second, following the predictions about plant functional specializations along resource availability gradients we hypothesized a correspondence between the average composition of traits generally associated with high relative growth rates (SLA, LDMC, leaf size) and competitive ability (plant height) (Grime et al 1997) and the composition of clonal and bud bank traits (van Groenendael et al 1996;Halassy et al 2005). …”

“…Some of these traits are fair predictors of plant performance (Kazakou et al 2006), competitive ability (Grime et al 1997) and tolerance to environmental harshness (Wright and Westoby 1999). There is also the understanding that these traits correspond to adaptations of plants along gradients of resource availability, and that are related to acquisition and retention strategies (Grime et al 1997). Numerous studies have concentrated on leaf traits, such as specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and leaf area (e.g., Reich et al 1992Reich et al , 1999Ryser and Urbas 2000), and substantial evidence at the level of species supports a correspondence between these traits and the level of resource availability.…”