Abstract
Resources such as water taken up by plants can be released into soils through hydraulic redistribution and can also be translocated by clonal integration within a plant clonal network. We hypothesized that the resources from one (donor) microsite could be translocated within a clonal network, released into different (recipient) microsites and subsequently used by neighbor plants in the recipient microsite. To test these hypotheses, we conducted two experiments in which connected and disconnected ramet pairs of Potentilla anserina were grown under both homogeneous and heterogeneous water regimes, with seedlings of Artemisia ordosica as neighbors. The isotopes [15N] and deuterium were used to trace the translocation of nitrogen and water, respectively, within the clonal network. The water and nitrogen taken up by P. anserina ramets in the donor microsite were translocated into the connected ramets in the recipient microsites. Most notably, portions of the translocated water and nitrogen were released into the recipient microsite and were used by the neighboring A. ordosica, which increased growth of the neighboring A. ordosica significantly. Therefore, our hypotheses were supported, and plant clonal integration mediated the horizontal hydraulic redistribution of resources, thus benefiting neighboring plants. Such a plant clonal integration-mediated resource redistribution in horizontal space may have substantial effects on the interspecific relations and composition of the community and consequently on ecosystem processes.
Highlights
The hydraulic redistribution (Burgess et al, 1998) of soil water have been observed to play important roles in many ecosystems, in arid and semiarid ones (Nadezhdina et al, 2010; Neumann and Cardon, 2012; Hao et al, 2013)
A large body of evidence has demonstrated that ramets growing in high resource patches translocate resources to the interconnected ramets growing in low resource patches, and this translocation occurs through horizontal structures such as rhizomes, stolons or roots (Atkinson and Else, 2012; Roiloa and Hutchings, 2013; Luo et al, 2014; Pinno and Wilson, 2014; Roiloa et al, 2014)
Our results show that water and nitrogen were translocated from a donor to a recipient ramet of P. anserina through clonal integration and released by the roots of the recipient ramet into the soil, most likely through hydraulic redistribution
Summary
The hydraulic redistribution (Burgess et al, 1998) of soil water have been observed to play important roles in many ecosystems, in arid and semiarid ones (Nadezhdina et al, 2010; Neumann and Cardon, 2012; Hao et al, 2013). A large body of evidence has demonstrated that ramets growing in high resource patches (donor ramets in donor microsites) translocate resources to the interconnected ramets growing in low resource patches (recipient ramets in recipient microsites), and this translocation occurs through horizontal structures such as rhizomes, stolons or roots (Atkinson and Else, 2012; Roiloa and Hutchings, 2013; Luo et al, 2014; Pinno and Wilson, 2014; Roiloa et al, 2014) Such clonal integration greatly improves the performance of the recipient ramets and often that of the entire clone (Yu et al, 2004; Song et al, 2013)
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