Succession of a broad-leaved Korean pine mixed forest: Functional plant trait composition

Abstract

Abstracts A longstanding goal of ecology and conservation biology is to understand the climatic and biological controls of forest succession. However, the patterns and mechanisms that guide forest succession, especially within broad-leaved forests, remain unclear. We collected leaf traits and abiotic data across a 200-year chronosequence within a broad-leaved Korean pine forest in northeastern China. We focused on five key leaf traits related to resource acquisition and competition by quantifying the community-weighted trait distributions for specific leaf area (SLA), leaf dry matter concentration (LDMC), leaf nitrogen content (Nmass (g/kg)), leaf phosphorus content (Pmass (g/kg)) and the ratio of nitrogen content to phosphorus content (Nmass/Pmass). We also studied how these traits respond to changing environmental variables (climatic, soil and topographical) during succession. Redundancy analysis was used to examine the importance of the environmental variables in shaping the successional variation in plant traits. Our results revealed the following. Older forests differed significantly from younger forests in species composition and trait distribution. For example, SLA, leaf N and P content and the N/P ratio tended to increase and then decrease throughout the community during forest succession (p