Abstract
Ecological strategy spectrum is the relative proportion of species in different categories of ecological strategies in a biotic community. Here, we explored ecological strategy spectra in typical forest vegetation types across four climatic zones in China. We classified ecological strategy categories by using the “StrateFy” ordination method based on three leaf functional traits. Results showed that the predominant ecological strategies of species in the tropical rainforest were CS-selected, and the predominant categories in the evergreen-deciduous broadleaved mixed forest and warm-temperate coniferous-broadleaved mixed forest were CSR and S/CSR categories respectively, whereas those in the cold-temperate coniferous forest were the S-selected ones. Ecological strategy richness of forest vegetation decreased significantly with the increase of latitude. The categories of ecological strategies with more component S increased while those with more component C decreased with the change of typical forest vegetation types from tropical rainforest through evergreen-deciduous broadleaved mixed forest and warm-temperate coniferous-broadleaved mixed forest to cool-temperate coniferous forest. Our findings highlight the usefulness of Grime’s C-S-R scheme for predicting the responses of vegetation to environmental changes, and the results are helpful in further elucidating species coexistence and community assembly in varied climatic and geographic settings.
Highlights
Ecological strategy spectrum is the relative proportion of species in different categories of ecological strategies in a biotic community
To evaluate the differences in ecological strategies among communities, by analogy with life-form spectrum, we proposed the ecological strategy spectrum based on C-S-R theory, which is the relative richness of species in different types of ecological strategies in a biotic community
Consistent with our hypotheses, the typical forest vegetation types across different climatic zones exhibited different distribution pattern of ecological strategies most species in tropical rainforest were classified as CS-selected strategies, CSR-selected strategies were evident in evergreen-deciduous broadleaved mixed forest and warm-temperate coniferous-broadleaved mixed forest, while for cold-temperate coniferous forest, S-selected strategies dominated (Fig. 1)
Summary
Ecological strategy spectrum is the relative proportion of species in different categories of ecological strategies in a biotic community. The life-form spectrum theory examined variations of plants in different forms of adaptation to the dominant stressful abiotic conditions in vegetation types under varied climatic zones[17]. A wider application and generalization of these methods on basis of the C-S-R theory has some limitations[32,33], since the traits used were often specific to certain plant organs or plant groups, or the species in particular regions To overcome these limitations, a CSR-classification method in which a few determined leaf traits are compared against the global leaf economics spectrum was developed[33]. Leaf area (LA) determines the ability of species to intercept light, which correlates with plant and seed size, orthogonal to the leaf economics s pectrum[27,33,34] This approach was considered to represent the most prominent aspects of plant functional variation globally[27]. Previous studies have confirmed that this method is generally applicable to vascular plants, sufficiently precise to distinguish strategies among species within genera, among populations within species and across biomes, and its validity has been confirmed in several experimental and field s tudies[7,16,35]
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