Abstract
Plant functional composition, defined by both community-weighted mean (CWM) traits and functional diversity, can provide insights into plant ecological strategies and community assembly. However, our understanding of plant functional composition during succession is largely based on aboveground traits. Here we investigated community-level traits and functional diversity for six pairs of analogous leaf and fine root traits of understory plants in a temperate forest swamp during succession with a decrease in soil pH and nutrient availability. CWMs of traits related to resource acquisition (including specific leaf area, specific root length, leaf N, leaf P, root N, and root P) decreased with succession, whereas those related to resource conservation (leaf dry matter content, root dry matter content, leaf tissue density, leaf C, and root C) increased along the forest swamp successional gradient. Multi-trait functional dispersion (FDis) of both leaf and fine root traits tended to decrease along the successional gradient, but functional richness and evenness were highest at the middle successional stage. Moreover, FDis of individual plant traits except N showed the same pattern as multi-trait FDis. Soil pH and nutrient availability were the main drivers of successional changes in both CWM traits and FDis. The changes of community-level traits along succession indicated a shift from acquisitive to conservative strategy of understory plants during forest swamp succession. Similar trends in leaf and fine root functional diversity along succession may indicate above- and belowground functional diversity are coordinated during the processes of plant community assembly. These findings of linkages between above- and belowground plant functional composition have important implications for plant community dynamics and assembly rules.
Highlights
Knowing how plant functional traits and their diversity vary under different environmental conditions would provides insight into species coexistence, and aids our understanding of vegetation shifts in response to environmental changes (Mason et al, 2012; Bruelheide et al, 2018)
Changes in Community-Weighted Mean Traits of Understory Plants During Succession To investigate the influences of succession on community-weighted mean (CWM) traits of forest swamps, we carried out one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and Tukey’s multiple comparison tests for CWM trait values among successional stages
We performed a principal component analysis (PCA) for CWM traits across the three forest swamp successional stages to investigate how community resource strategies shifted along the successional gradient
Summary
Knowing how plant functional traits and their diversity vary under different environmental conditions would provides insight into species coexistence, and aids our understanding of vegetation shifts in response to environmental changes (Mason et al, 2012; Bruelheide et al, 2018). Lohbeck et al (2012) found that incidence-based functional diversity of multiple leaf and wood traits increased logarithmically with succession of tropical secondary forests. Bhaskar et al (2014) found that how plant functional diversity of seasonally dry tropical forests changed after management activities depended on the traits studied (i.e. specific leaf area, leaf N, and wood density). These studies have made significant contributions to our understanding of the diversity of aboveground functional traits along successional or environmental gradients. Community-level traits and functional diversity for fine root traits along environmental gradients is much less well understood (but see Holdaway et al, 2011; Fry et al, 2018; Caplan et al, 2019), which greatly hinders investigation of community assembly operating on belowground plant communities
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