Abstract
Foraging behavior, one of the adaptive strategies of clonal plants, has stimulated a tremendous amount of research. However, it is a matter of debate whether there is any general pattern in the foraging traits (functional traits related to foraging behavior) of clonal plants in response to diverse environments. We collected data from 97 published papers concerning the relationships between foraging traits (e.g., spacer length, specific spacer length, branch intensity and branch angle) of clonal plants and essential resources (e.g., light, nutrients and water) for plant growth and reproduction. We incorporated the phylogenetic information of 85 plant species to examine the universality of foraging hypotheses using phylogenetic meta-analysis. The trends toward forming longer spacers and fewer branches in shaded environments were detected in clonal plants, but no evidence for a relation between foraging traits and nutrient availability was detected, except that there was a positive correlation between branch intensity and nutrient availability in stoloniferous plants. The response of the foraging traits of clonal plants to water availability was also not obvious. Additionally, our results indicated that the foraging traits of stoloniferous plants were more sensitive to resource availability than those of rhizomatous plants. In consideration of plant phylogeny, these results implied that the foraging traits of clonal plants (notably stoloniferous plants) only responded to light intensity in a general pattern but did not respond to nutrient or water availability. In conclusion, our findings on the effects of the environment on the foraging traits of clonal plants avoided the confounding effects of phylogeny because we incorporated phylogeny into the meta-analysis.
Highlights
Essential resources such as light, water and soil nutrients often have heterogeneous distributions in natural habitats [1,2,3,4]
Responses of foraging traits to resource heterogeneity Clonal plants adapt to changing environments by developing different adaptive strategies, mainly in the plasticity of plant traits
We found that internode length was more flexible in response to light intensity, whereas spacer length had no significant response to environmental heterogeneity
Summary
Essential resources such as light, water and soil nutrients often have heterogeneous distributions in natural habitats [1,2,3,4]. The success of clonal plants may occur because their distinctive life-history strategies [9,10] allow them to cope with the heterogeneity of essential resources. One of these strategies is plastic foraging, i.e., the processes whereby an organism searches or ramifies within its habitat to enhance its acquisition of essential resources [6,11,12]. Foraging strategies help clonal plants escape from unfavorable patches and/or exploit favorable ones by altering the clonal morphology of spacers and branching in patchy environments [6,13,14]
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