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Abstract
The adaptation of plants to drought through the adjustment of their leaf functional traits is a hot topic in plant ecology. However, while there is a good understanding of how individual species adapt to drought in this way, the way in which different functional types adapt to drought along a precipitation gradient remains poorly understood. In this study, we sampled 22 sites along a precipitation gradient in the Inner Mongolia grassland and measured eight leaf functional traits across 39 dominant species to determine the adaptive strategies of plant leaves to drought at the species and plant functional type levels. We found that leaf functional traits were mainly influenced by both aridity and phylogeny at the species level. There were four types of leaf adaptations to drought at the functional type level: adjusting the carbon-nitrogen ratio, the specific leaf area, the nitrogen content, and the specific leaf area and leaf nitrogen content simultaneously. These findings indicate that there is the trade-offs relationship between water and nitrogen acquisition as the level of drought increases, which is consistent with the worldwide leaf economics spectrum. In this study, we highlighted that the leaf economic spectrum can be adopted to reveal the adaptations of plants to drought in the Inner Mongolia grassland.
Highlights
Arid and semi-arid regions occupy approximately 45% of the Earth’s land area and feed 38% of its population and include some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and water resource systems (Narisma et al, 2007)
Mongolia grassland, which is consistent with the findings of previous studies which found that plants can adapt to drought by regulating their leaf functional traits (Wright et al, 2004; Jung et al, 2014; Valencia et al, 2015)
We found that the single leaf area, specific leaf area and leaf carbon-nitrogen ratio were significantly affected by phylogeny at the species level, suggesting that these three functional traits may be “conserved traits” that have a have strong phylogenetic signal (Blomberg et al, 2003)
Summary
Arid and semi-arid regions occupy approximately 45% of the Earth’s land area and feed 38% of its population and include some of the most vulnerable ecosystems and water resource systems (Narisma et al, 2007). The resource trade-offs strategy is an important mechanism for LES, whereby plants that invest more resources in a particular functional trait will inevitably reduce the input of resources into other traits due to the total amount of resources that are available to the plants being limited, and such a trade-offs strategy has provided a mechanism by which plants can adapt to the environment in different geographical regions and ecosystems (Wright et al, 2005; Shipley et al, 2006; Ocheltree et al, 2016). Studies that focus on characteristics of leaves of individual single species under different environmental conditions are important for revealing specific adaptive strategies at the species level (Zhu et al, 2012; Ramirez-Valiente et al, 2015; Liu et al, 2018).
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