Small-scale drivers: the importance of nutrient availability and snowmelt timing on performance of the alpine shrub Salix herbacea

Abstract

Alpine plant communities are predicted to face range shifts and possibly extinctions with climate change. Fine-scale environmental variation such as nutrient availability or snowmelt timing may contribute to the ability of plant species to persist locally; however, variation in nutrient availability in alpine landscapes is largely unmeasured. On three mountains around Davos, Switzerland, we deployed Plant Root Simulator probes around 58 Salix herbacea plants along an elevational and microhabitat gradient to measure nutrient availability during the first 5 weeks of the summer growing season, and used in situ temperature loggers and observational data to determine date of spring snowmelt. We also visited the plants weekly to assess Communicated by Hermann Heilmeier.This study examines how fine-scale variation in the interactions among nutrient availability, snowmelt timing, soil moisture, and other abiotic factors aredistributed throughout a Swiss alpine landscape. Unlike many previous studies that have used single-factor approaches to assess spatial variation in nutrient availability, we used a multivariate, integrative technique that includes the effects of soil moisture on nutrient uptake. Using this approach, we show that microhabitats can vary as much over 30 to 40 meters as they do from the top to bottom of kilometer-long elevational transects. performance, as measured by stem number, fruiting, and herbivory damage. We found a wide snowmelt gradient which determined growing season length, as well as variations of an order of magnitude or more in the accumulation of 12 nutrients between different microhabitats. Higher nutrient availability had negative effects on most shrub performance metrics, for instance decreasing stem number and the proportion of stems producing fruits. High nutrient availability was associated with increased herbivory damage in early-melting microhabitats, but among late-emerging plants this pattern was reversed. We demonstrate that nutrient availability is highly variable in alpine settings, and that it strongly influences performance in an alpine dwarf shrub, sometimes modifying the response of shrubs to snowmelt timing. As the climate warms and human-induced nitrogen deposition continues in the Alps, these factors may contribute to patterns of local plants persistence.

Lessons from Common Bean on How Wild Relatives and Landraces Can Make Tropical Crops More Resistant to Climate Change

“…These types of studies will likely go beyond estimates of drought tolerance, as exemplified here, to also include estimates regarding frost stress (i.e. [52][53][54]), nutrient limitation [55,56], as well as other threats imposed by climate change [57,58] in different types of ecosystems (e.g. [59]) and screened by a variety wide range of genotyping techniques [60][61][62][63].…”

Naturally Available Genetic Adaptation in Common Bean and Its Response to Climate Change

“…We envision that genome-environment association studies coupled with estimates of genome-wide diversity will become more common in the oncoming years. These types of studies will likely go beyond estimates of drought tolerance, as exemplified here, to also include estimates regarding frost stress (i.e., [52][53][54]), nutrient limitation [55,56], as well as other threats imposed by climate change [57,58] in different types of ecosystems (e.g., [59]) and screened by a variety/wide range of genotyping techniques [60][61][62][63]. Genomic selection models [64] could also incorporate at some point environmental variables in order to improve the prediction of phenotypic variation and the estimation of the genotype-by-environment interactions [65] in the light of linkage disequilibrium (LD) [66] and various stochastic models [67,68].…”

Local Scale Genetic Diversity and its Role in Coping with Changing Climate

“…It is an essential component that must be accounted for in ecological and genetic studies. Soil temperature data loggers, nutrient probes and ield observations can be used to estimate drought severity [61], frost events [14], snowmelt timing [8], nutrient availability [13] and other soil properties [33]. Monitoring of individuals carried out weekly during the growing season and across microhabitats during several growing seasons is the most exhaustive and informative survey method, although fewer snapshots can also be used.…”

“…Therefore, to understand processes involved in potential responses to changing conditions, it is important to consider not only climate diferences between diferent altitudes but also diferences between microhabitats [12][13][14], because environmental variation at a local-scale can be high [15]. In this chapter, I explore the microhabitat-driven paterns (Section 2) and processes (Section 3) and its impact on genetic diversity.…”