Does a trade-off between growth plasticity and resource conservatism mediate post-fire shrubland responses to rainfall seasonality?

Mediterranean climate change fire phenotypic plasticity rainfall resource conservatism shrubland soil nutrients

Journal

The New phytologist
ISSN: 1469-8137
Titre abrégé: New Phytol
Pays: England
ID NLM: 9882884

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
05 2021
Historique:
received: 20 12 2020
accepted: 27 01 2021
pubmed: 2 2 2021
medline: 15 5 2021
entrez: 1 2 2021
Statut: ppublish

Résumé

Growth plasticity may allow fire-prone species to maximize their recovery rates during temporary, sporadic periods of rainfall availability in the post-fire environment. However, moisture-driven growth plasticity could be maladaptive in nutrient-limited environments that require tighter control of growth and resource use. We investigated whether a trade-off between plasticity and conservatism mediates growth responses to altered rainfall seasonality in neighbouring shrubland communities that occupy different soils. We monitored post-fire vegetation regrowth in two structurally similar, Mediterranean-type shrublands for 3 years. We investigated the effects of experimentally altered rainfall seasonality on post-fire species' growth rates. We found that moisture-driven growth plasticity was higher among species occupying the fertile soils of the renosterveld site relative to those occupying the nutrient-poor soils of the fynbos site. This resulted in higher overall responsiveness of post-fire recovery patterns in renosterveld to experimental shifts in rainfall seasonality. In post-fire shrubland communities, the trade-off between moisture-dependent growth plasticity and resource conservatism could be mediated by soil nutrient availability. Therefore, edaphic differences between structurally similar shrublands could lead to differences in their sensitivity to post-fire rainfall seasonality.

Identifiants

pubmed: 33524198
doi: 10.1111/nph.17246
doi:

Substances chimiques

Soil 0

Types de publication

Journal Article Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

1407-1420

Informations de copyright

© 2021 The Authors New Phytologist © 2021 New Phytologist Foundation.

Références

Altwegg R, West A, Gillson L, Midgley GF. 2014. Impacts of climate change in the Greater Cape Floristic Region. In: Allsopp N, Colville JF, Verboom GA, eds. Fynbos: ecology, evolution, and conservation of a megadiverse region. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press, 299-320.
Anacker BL, Whittall JB, Goldberg EE, Harrison SP. 2011. Origins and consequences of serpentine endemism in the California flora. Evolution 65: 365-376.
Barber SA. 1962. A diffusion and mass-flow concept of soil nutrient availability. Soil Science 93: 39-49.
Bellingham PJ, Sparrow AD. 2000. Resprouting as a life history strategy in woody plant communities. Oikos 89: 409-416.
Bergh NG, Verboom GA, Rouget M, Cowling RM. 2014. Vegetation types of the Greater Cape Floristic Region. In: Allsopp N, Colville JF, Verboom GA, eds. Fynbos: ecology, evolution, and conservation of a megadiverse region. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press, 1-25.
Bond WJ, van Wilgen BW. 2012. Fire and plants (Vol. 14). Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Springer Science & Business Media.
Boorse GC, Ewers FW, Davis SD. 1998. Response of chaparral shrubs to below-freezing temperatures: acclimation, ecotypes, seedlings vs. adults. American Journal of Botany 85: 1224-1230.
Bradshaw AD. 1965. Evolutionary significance of phenotypic plasticity in plants. Advances in Genetics 13: 115-155.
Bradshaw PL, Cowling RM. 2014. Landscapes, rock types, and climate of the Greater Cape Floristic Region. In: Allsopp N, Colville JF, Verboom GA, eds. Fynbos: ecology, evolution, and conservation of a megadiverse region. New York, NY, USA: Oxford University Press, 26-46.
Brown G, Mitchell DT. 1986. Influence of fire on the soil phosphorus status in sand plain lowland fynbos, south-western Cape. South African Journal of Botany 52: 67-72.
Burggren W. 2018. Developmental phenotypic plasticity helps bridge stochastic weather events associated with climate change. Journal of Experimental Biology 221: jeb161984.
Chapin FS III. 1980. The mineral nutrition of wild plants. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 11: 233-260.
Cheung CM, Williams TC, Poolman MG, Fell DA, Ratcliffe RG, Sweetlove LJ. 2013. A method for accounting for maintenance costs in flux balance analysis improves the prediction of plant cell metabolic phenotypes under stress conditions. The Plant Journal 75: 1050-1061.
Cowling RM, Ojeda F, Lamont BB, Rundel PW, Lechmere-Oertel R. 2005. Rainfall reliability, a neglected factor in explaining convergence and divergence of plant traits in fire-prone Mediterranean-climate ecosystems. Global Ecology and Biogeography 14: 509-519.
Cramer MD, Hoffman MT. 2015. The consequences of precipitation seasonality for Mediterranean-ecosystem vegetation of South Africa. PLoS ONE 10: e0144512.
Crisp MD, Cook LG. 2012. Phylogenetic niche conservatism: what are the underlying evolutionary and ecological causes? New Phytologist 196: 681-694.
Dannenmann M, Díaz-Pinés E, Kitzler B, Karhu K, Tejedor J, Ambus P, Butterbach-Bahl K. 2018. Postfire nitrogen balance of Mediterranean shrublands: direct combustion losses versus gaseous and leaching losses from the postfire soil mineral nitrogen flush. Global Change Biology 24: 4505-4520.
DeWitt TJ, Sih A, Wilson DS. 1998. Costs and limits of phenotypic plasticity. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 13: 77-81.
Diaz S, Hodgson JG, Thompson K, Cabido M, Cornelissen JH, Jalili A, Band SR. 2004. The plant traits that drive ecosystems: evidence from three continents. Journal of Vegetation Science 15: 295-304.
Domec JC, Gartner BL. 2003. Relationship between growth rates and xylem hydraulic characteristics in young, mature and old-growth ponderosa pine trees. Plant, Cell & Environment 26: 471-483.
Esler KJ, Von Staden L, Midgley GF. 2015. Determinants of the Fynbos/Succulent Karoo biome boundary: insights from a reciprocal transplant experiment. South African Journal of Botany 101: 120-128.
Falster DS, Westoby M. 2003. Plant height and evolutionary games. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 18: 337-343.
Frazer JM, Davis SD. 1988. Differential survival of chaparral seedlings during the first summer drought after wildfire. Oecologia 76: 215-221.
Gianoli E, González-Teuber M. 2005. Environmental heterogeneity and population differentiation in plasticity to drought in Convolvulus chilensis (Convolvulaceae). Evolutionary Ecology 19: 603-613.
Heelemann S, Procheş Ş, Rebelo AG, van Wilgen BW, Porembski S, Cowling RM. 2008. Fire season effects on the recruitment of non-sprouting serotinous Proteaceae in the eastern (bimodal rainfall) fynbos biome, South Africa. Austral Ecology 33: 119-127.
Hewitson BC, Crane RG. 2006. Consensus between GCM climate change projections with empirical downscaling: precipitation downscaling over South Africa. International Journal of Climatology 26: 1315-1337.
IPCC, Pachauri RK, Reisinger A, eds. 2007. Climate change 2007: synthesis report. Contribution of working groups I, II and III to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Geneva, Switzerland: IPCC.
Jacobsen AL, Pratt RB. 2018. Extensive drought-associated plant mortality as an agent of type-conversion in chaparral shrublands. New Phytologist 219: 498-504.
Jacobsen AL, Tobin MF, Toschi HS, Percolla MI, Pratt RB. 2016. Structural determinants of increased susceptibility to dehydration-induced cavitation in post-fire resprouting chaparral shrubs. Plant, Cell & Environment 39: 2473-2485.
Keeley JE. 1986. Resilience of Mediterranean shrub communities to fire. In: Dell B, Hopkins AJM, Lamont BB, eds. Resilience in Mediterranean type ecosystems. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: W. Junk Publishers, 95-112.
Keeley JE, Fotheringham CJ, Baer-Keeley M. 2005. Factors affecting plant diversity during post-fire recovery and succession of Mediterranean-climate shrublands in California, USA. Diversity and Distributions 11: 525-537.
Keeley JE, Keeley SC. 1977. Energy allocation patterns of a sprouting and a nonsprouting species of Arctostaphylos in the California chaparral. American Midland Naturalist 98: 1-10.
Klausmeyer KR, Shaw MR. 2009. Climate change, habitat loss, protected areas and the climate adaptation potential of species in Mediterranean ecosystems worldwide. PLoS ONE 4: e6392.
Kutiel P, Naveh Z. 1987. The effect of fire on nutrients in a pine forest soil. Plant and Soil 104: 269-274.
Lambers HANS, Poorter H. 1992. Inherent variation in growth rate between higher plants: a search for physiological causes and ecological consequences. Advances in Ecological Research 23: 187-261.
Leffler AJ, Monaco TA, James JJ. 2011. Nitrogen acquisition by annual and perennial grass seedlings: testing the roles of performance and plasticity to explain plant invasion. Plant Ecology 212: 1601-1611.
Levyns MR. 1938. Some evidence bearing on the past history of the Cape flora. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Africa 26: 401-424.
Linder P, Campbell BM. 1979. Towards a structural-functional classification of fynbos: a comparison of methods. Bothalia 12: 723-729.
Lortie CJ, Aarssen LW. 1996. The specialization hypothesis for phenotypic plasticity in plants. International Journal of Plant Sciences 157: 484-487.
Manning J, Goldblatt P. 2012. Plants of the Greater Cape Floristic Region. 1: The Core Cape flora, Strelitzia 29. Pretoria, South Africa: South African National Biodiversity Institute.
Marumbwa FM, Cho MA, Chirwa PW. 2019. Analysis of spatio-temporal rainfall trends across southern African biomes between 1981 and 2016. Physics and Chemistry of the Earth, Parts A/B/C 114: e102808.
Moreno JM, Oechel WC. 1992. Factors controlling postfire seedling establishment in southern California chaparral. Oecologia 90: 50-60.
Moreno JM, Zuazua E, Pérez B, Luna B, Velasco A, Resco de Dios V. 2011. Rainfall patterns after fire differentially affect the recruitment of three Mediterranean shrubs. Biogeosciences 8: 3721-3732.
Mucina L, Rutherford MC. 2006. The vegetation of South Africa. Pretoria, South Africa: South African National Biodiversity Institute.
Murren CJ, Auld JR, Callahan H, Ghalambor CK, Handelsman CA, Heskel MA, Pfennig DW. 2015. Constraints on the evolution of phenotypic plasticity: limits and costs of phenotype and plasticity. Heredity 115: 293-301.
Nicotra AB, Atkin OK, Bonser SP, Davidson AM, Finnegan EJ, Mathesius U, van Kleunen M. 2010. Plant phenotypic plasticity in a changing climate. Trends in Plant Science 15: 684-692.
Nicotra AB, Hermes JP, Jones CS, Schlichting CD. 2007. Geographic variation and plasticity to water and nutrients in Pelargonium australe. New Phytologist 176: 136-149.
Parra A, Moreno JM. 2018. Drought differentially affects the post-fire dynamics of seeders and resprouters in a Mediterranean shrubland. Science of the Total Environment 626: 1219-1229.
Pausas JG, Pratt RB, Keeley JE, Jacobsen AL, Ramirez AR, Vilagrosa A, Davis SD. 2016. Towards understanding resprouting at the global scale. New Phytologist 209: 945-954.
Pintado A, Valladares F, Sancho LG. 1997. Exploring phenotypic plasticity in the lichen Ramalina capitata: morphology, water relations and chlorophyll content in north and south-facing populations. Annals of Botany 80: 345-353.
Power SC, Verboom GA, Bond WJ, Cramer MD. 2019. Does a tradeoff between trait plasticity and resource conservatism contribute to the maintenance of alternative stable states? New Phytologist 223: 1809-1819.
Pratt RB, Jacobsen AL, Ramirez AR, Helms AM, Traugh CA, Tobin MF, Davis SD. 2014. Mortality of resprouting chaparral shrubs after a fire and during a record drought: physiological mechanisms and demographic consequences. Global Change Biology 20: 893-907.
Prieto P, Peñuelas J, Lloret F, Llorens L, Estiarte M. 2009. Experimental drought and warming decrease diversity and slow down post-fire succession in a Mediterranean shrubland. Ecography 32: 623-636.
R Development Core Team. 2018. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna, Austria: R Foundation for Statistical Computing.
Richards MB, Lamont BB. 1996. Post-fire mortality and water relations of three congeneric shrub species under extreme water stress - a trade-off with fecundity? Oecologia 107: 53-60.
Shane MW, Cramer MD, Lambers H. 2008. Root of edaphically controlled Proteaceae turnover on the Agulhas Plain, South Africa: phosphate uptake regulation and growth. Plant, Cell & Environment 31: 1825-1833.
Shane MW, Lambers H. 2005. Cluster roots: a curiosity in context. Plant and Soil 274: 101-125.
Stock WD, Lewis OAM. 1986. Soil nitrogen and the role of fire as a mineralizing agent in a South African coastal fynbos ecosystem. The Journal of Ecology 1: 317-328.
Sultan SE. 2000. Phenotypic plasticity for plant development, function and life history. Trends in Plant Science 5: 537-542.
Tadross M, Jack C, Hewitson B. 2005. On RCM-based projections of change in southern African summer climate. Geophysical Research Letters 32: L23713.
Thuiller W, Slingsby JA, Privett SD, Cowling RM. 2007. Stochastic species turnover and stable coexistence in a species-rich, fire-prone plant community. PLoS ONE 2: e938.
Valladares F, Balaguer L, Martinez-Ferri E, Perez-Corona E, Manrique E. 2002. Plasticity, instability and canalization: is the phenotypic variation in seedlings of sclerophyll oaks consistent with the environmental unpredictability of Mediterranean ecosystems? New Phytologist 156: 457-467.
Valladares F, Gialoni E, Gómez JM. 2007. Ecological limits to phenotypic plasticity. New Phytologist 176: 749-763.
Valladares F, Wright SJ, Lasso E, Kitajima K, Pearcy RW. 2000. Plastic phenotypic response to light of 16 congeneric shrubs from a Panamanian rainforest. Ecology 81: 1925-1936.
Verboom GA, Stock WD, Cramer MD. 2017. Specialization to extremely low-nutrient soils limits the nutritional adaptability of plant lineages. American Naturalist 189: 684-699.
Vilagrosa A, Hernández EI, Luis VC, Cochard H, Pausas JG. 2014. Physiological differences explain the co-existence of different regeneration strategies in Mediterranean ecosystems. New Phytologist 201: 1277-1288.
Walter A, Schurr U. 2005. Dynamics of leaf and root growth: endogenous control versus environmental impact. Annals of Botany 95: 891-900.
West AG, Dawson TE, February EC, Midgley GF, Bond WJ, Aston TL. 2012. Diverse functional responses to drought in a Mediterranean-type shrubland in South Africa. New Phytologist 195: 396-407.
Witkowski ETF. 1988. Response to nutrient additions by the plant growth forms of sand-plain lowland fynbos, South Africa. Vegetatio 79: 89-97.
Witkowski ETF. 1991. Growth and competition between seedlings of Protea repens (L.) L. and the alien invasive, Acacia saligna (Labill.) Wendl. in relation to nutrient availability. Functional Ecology 1: 101-110.
Wright IJ, Reich PB, Westoby M, Ackerly DD, Baruch Z, Bongers F, Flexas J. 2004. The worldwide leaf economics spectrum. Nature 428: 821-827.
Zunzunegui M, Barradas MCD, Ain-Lhout F, Alvarez-Cansino L, Esquivias MP, Novo FG. 2011. Seasonal physiological plasticity and recovery capacity after summer stress in Mediterranean scrub communities. Plant Ecology 212: 127-142.

Auteurs

Justin J van Blerk (JJ)

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

Adam G West (AG)

Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

Res Altwegg (R)

Centre for Statistics in Ecology, Environment and Conservation, Department of Statistical Sciences, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

M Timm Hoffman (MT)

Plant Conservation Unit, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Private Bag X3, Rondebosch, 7701, South Africa.

Articles similaires

Populus Soil Microbiology Soil Microbiota Fungi
Lakes Salinity Archaea Bacteria Microbiota
Rivers Turkey Biodiversity Environmental Monitoring Animals
1.00
Iran Environmental Monitoring Seasons Ecosystem Forests

Classifications MeSH