Abstract
Rising air temperatures may change the risks of invasive plants; however, little is known about how different warming timings affect the growth and stress-tolerance of invasive plants. We conducted an experiment with an invasive plant Eupatorium adenophorum and a native congener Eupatorium chinense, and contrasted their mortality, plant height, total biomass, and biomass allocation in ambient, day-, night-, and daily-warming treatments. The mortality of plants was significantly higher in E. chinense than E. adenophorum in four temperature regimes. Eupatorium adenophorum grew larger than E. chinense in the ambient climate, and this difference was amplified with warming. On the basis of the net effects of warming, daily-warming exhibited the strongest influence on E. adenophorum, followed by day-warming and night-warming. There was a positive correlation between total biomass and root weight ratio in E. adenophorum, but not in E. chinense. These findings suggest that climate warming may enhance E. adenophorum invasions through increasing its growth and stress-tolerance, and that day-, night- and daily-warming may play different roles in this facilitation.
Highlights
Air temperature is a fundamental condition limiting communities, and changes in temperatures may influence the performance of individual species [1,2,3]
No plants died for E. chinense and E. adenophorum, both species shared similar plant height (Fig. 1; 33.164.2 (1 SE) cm vs 25.461.4 cm; F1,18 = 3.155, P = 0.078), E. chinense had much smaller biomass than E. adenophorum (Fig. 2; 1.1560.21 g vs 2.6560.19 g; F1,18 = 28.879, P,0.001), both species had similar root weight ratio (RWR) (Fig. 3; 0.6460.02 vs 0.6060.01; F1,18 = 2.487, P = 0.104)
Day-warming had no effects on plant height and total biomass of E. chinense (Figs. 1 & 2; all P.0.05), but allowed E. adenophorum plants to grow higher (Fig. 1; F1,18 = 15.596, P = 0.003) and to yield greater biomass (Fig. 2; F1,18 = 7.468, P = 0.019)
Summary
Air temperature is a fundamental condition limiting communities, and changes in temperatures may influence the performance of individual species [1,2,3]. Day-, night- and daily-warming can differentially shift the benefits of clonal integration [5], and affect the carbon budgets of temperate steppe ecosystems [6]. Little is known about the effects of different warming timings on invasive plants. On the other hand, warming can change microclimates and soil water regimes, resulting in multiple stresses [1,2]. It is likely that different climate warming timings pose differential effects on source-sink relationships and multiple stresses, subsequently influencing the growth and stresstolerance of plants. It is still poorly known, to our knowledge, that how day-, night- and daily-warming influence these two aspects
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