Abstract
Environments are patchy in not only abiotic factors but also biotic ones. Many studies have examined effects of spatial heterogeneity in abiotic factors such as light, water and nutrients on the growth of clonal plants, but few have tested those in biotic factors. We conducted a greenhouse experiment to examine how patchy distributions of competitors affect the growth of a rhizomatous wetland plant Bolboschoenus planiculmis and whether such effects depend on the density of the competitors. We grew one ramet of B. planiculmis in the center of each of the experimental boxes without competitors (Schoenoplectus triqueter), with a homogeneous distribution of the competitors of low or high density, and with a patchy distribution of the competitors of low or high density. The presence of competitors markedly decreased the growth (biomass, number of ramets, number of tubers and rhizome length) of the B. planiculmis clones. When the density of the competitors was low, the growth of B. planiculmis did not differ significantly between the competitor patches and competitor-free patches. However, when the density of the competitors was high, the growth of B. planiculmis was significantly higher in the competitor-free patches than in the competitor patches. Therefore, B. planiculmis can respond to patchy distributions of competitors by placing more ramets in competition-free patches when the density of competitors is high, but cannot do so when the density of competitors is low.
Highlights
Environments are spatially patchy with regard to abiotic factors and biotic ones [1,2,3,4,5]
Effects at the patch level None of the growth measures differed between the northeast to southwest (NE-SW) and the northwest to southeast (NW-SE) patches in the three homogeneous treatments (C, HL and high density (HH)) or the patchy, low density treatment (PL; F1, 10 = 0.01 – 2.57, P = 0.140 – 0.948, Table 2; Figs. 4 and 5)
F-values, degree of freedoms and P-values are based on linear contrasts between the NE-SW and NW-SE patches
Summary
Environments are spatially patchy with regard to abiotic factors (e.g. light, water and nutrients) and biotic ones (e.g. competitors) [1,2,3,4,5]. Numerous studies have examined effects of spatial heterogeneity in abiotic factors such as light, water and nutrients on the growth of clonal plants [3,4,5,6,8,9,10]. The spatial distributions of individuals are in many cases not homogeneous but patchy [17], and the presence of conspecific neighbor plants can compete with the target clonal plant for resources (light, water and nutrients) and physical space [18,19]. A heterogeneous distribution of competitors may create an environment with spatial heterogeneity of both resources and physical space. Since clonal plants often experience such environments in natural communities, they may have developed some strategies to cope with such a type of heterogeneity [6,7,12]
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