Community functional responses to soil and climate at multiple spatial scales: when does intraspecific variation matter?

Andrew Siefert,Jason D Fridley,Mark E Ritchie,Suzannah Rutherford

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0111189

Abstract

Despite increasing evidence of the importance of intraspecific trait variation in plant communities, its role in community trait responses to environmental variation, particularly along broad-scale climatic gradients, is poorly understood. We analyzed functional trait variation among early-successional herbaceous plant communities (old fields) across a 1200-km latitudinal extent in eastern North America, focusing on four traits: vegetative height, leaf area, specific leaf area (SLA), and leaf dry matter content (LDMC). We determined the contributions of species turnover and intraspecific variation to between-site functional dissimilarity at multiple spatial scales and community trait responses to edaphic and climatic factors. Among-site variation in community mean trait values and community trait responses to the environment were generated by a combination of species turnover and intraspecific variation, with species turnover making a greater contribution for all traits. The relative importance of intraspecific variation decreased with increasing geographic and environmental distance between sites for SLA and leaf area. Intraspecific variation was most important for responses of vegetative height and responses to edaphic compared to climatic factors. Individual species displayed strong trait responses to environmental factors in many cases, but these responses were highly variable among species and did not usually scale up to the community level. These findings provide new insights into the role of intraspecific trait variation in plant communities and the factors controlling its relative importance. The contribution of intraspecific variation to community trait responses was greatest at fine spatial scales and along edaphic gradients, while species turnover dominated at broad spatial scales and along climatic gradients.

Highlights

Understanding and predicting how communities respond to environmental variation is a central goal of ecology, and ecologists are increasingly adopting trait-based approaches to study these responses [1,2,3]
We addressed the following questions: 1) What is the relative importance of species turnover vs. intraspecific variation to among-site trait variation, and how is this influenced by spatial scale? We hypothesized that the relative importance of intraspecific trait variation would decrease with increasing spatial scale and breadth of environmental gradients
Recent studies have shown that intraspecific trait variation may play a fundamental role in responses of plant communities to environmental variation [10,11,12,19], but many questions remain about when intraspecific variation matters at the community level and the factors controlling its relative importance

Summary

Introduction

Understanding and predicting how communities respond to environmental variation is a central goal of ecology, and ecologists are increasingly adopting trait-based approaches to study these responses [1,2,3]. Understanding how community trait distributions, communityweighted mean trait values (CWMs), respond to environmental variation has become a major focus in community ecology [5,7,8]. [10] found that community-level responses of multiple traits to fertilization and mowing in grassland communities were primarily driven by intraspecific responses Results of these and other recent studies [12,13,14] demonstrate that accounting for intraspecific trait variation may be crucial for quantifying community trait responses to the environment, but the relative magnitude of intraspecific variation has varied strongly among and within studies. Determining when and where intraspecific variation matters at the community level is a major concern for plant ecology, with important implications for predicting community and ecosystem responses to global change [15]

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