Citation from DataCite
ORCID: 0000-0001-6010-2568
Affiliation: Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research (ZALF), Müncheberg (Germany), GRID: 433014.1
Schmidt, Kristina
GEMET: genetic variation, ecological abundance, ecological niche, competition (biological)
Others: Plant functional trait, species abundance, trait-environment relationship, niche width, scale dependency, competition
One of the few laws in ecology is that communities consist of few common and many rare taxa.
Functional traits may help to identify the underlying mechanisms of this community pattern, since they correlate with different niche dimensions. However, comprehensive studies are missing that investigate the effects of species mean traits (niche position) and intraspecific trait variability (ITV, niche width) on species abundance. In this study, we tested three predictions: species abundance a)
increases (or decreases) with species mean traits, b) is highest for intermediate species mean traits, and c) increases with ITV. We measured three plant functional traits (specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, plant height) at 21 local dry grassland communities (10m x 10m) and analyzed the effect of these traits and their variation on species abundance at the local and regional scale. In our analyses we compared phylogenetic-corrected with standard models, in order to reveal whether the
relationships between traits and species abundance are influenced by the species’ phylogeny. At the local scale, we found that species abundance increased with species mean leaf dry matter content and the intraspecific variations of leaf dry matter content and plant height. In contrast, at the regional scale, plants with a higher ITV of plant height were less abundant. We found no evidence
that the consideration of phylogenetic-relationships influenced significantly our findings nor that species with intermediate traits were more abundant. Overall, our results indicate that the tolerance towards environmental conditions rather than competitive ability drives species abundance. Hereby, ITV may be particularly beneficial in heterogeneous environments at the local scale. However, the contrasting effect of ITV at the regional scale shows that trait-abundance relationships seem to be highly scale-dependent.
Methods:
Data collection took place at 21 dry grassland patches. Within each patch, one 10 m x 10 m plot in a visually homogeneous area was established. At each plot, nested vegetation surveys were conducted including eight 0.3 m x 0.3 m subplots. Local abundance defines the species frequency within these eight 0.3 m x 0.3 m subplots. Regional abundance was defined as the frequency of species occurring in the 21 plots. At each plot, six perennial species were chosen randomly for trait measurements and sampled with twelve randomly selected individuals per species within the plots.
Traits were measured for all selected individuals following Perez-Harguindeguy et al. (2013).
funderIdentifier (GRID): 5586.e
Table
traits
Table LocalAbundance
Table RegionalAbundance
Sample Data
Table LocalAbundance
Table RegionalAbundance
Table Traits
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This data by ZALF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0
| Column name | Unit | Description | Instrument | Method | Reference |
| date | - | Sampling date | - | - | - |
| plot | - | Site number of dry grasslands | - | - | - |
| spec_name | - | Short version of species name; see table RegionalAbundance for complete names | - | - | - |
| plant_type | - | Plant type: grass or forb | - | - | - |
| Ind | - | Individual; Number 1-12 | - | counting | - |
| FG_g | g | Fresh weight of two leafs | scale | weighing | - |
| FG_mg | mg | Fresh weight of two leafs | scale | weighing | - |
| TG_g | g | Dry weight of two leafs | drying oven | weighing | - |
| TG_mg | mg | Dry weight of two leafs | drying oven | weighing | - |
| LA | mm | Leaf area of two leafs | ruler | leaf area measurement | - |
| SLA | mm²/mg | Specific leaf area; leaf area divided by dry weight | - | calculation | - |
| LDMC | mg/g | Leaf dry matter content; dry weight divided by fresh weight | - | calculation | - |
| Height | cm | Height of the plant from soil to highest photosynthetic tissue | ruler | - | - |
| BM | g | Dry weight of plant without the two leafs | drying oven | weighing | - |
| BM_ges | g | Total dry weight: dry weight of entire plant (leaf dry weight added) | drying oven | weighing | - |
Table LocalAbundance
| Column name | Unit | Description | Instrument | Method | Reference |
| plot | - | Site number of dry grasslands | - | - | |
| spec_name | - | Columns 2-46: Species names (short version) | - | - |
Table RegionalAbundance
| Column name | Unit | Description | Instrument | Method | Reference |
| Abundance | - | Number of occurrences in study area; 1-23 | - | - | |
| Species short | - | Short version of species name | - | - | |
| Species_long | - | Complete species name | - | - |
Table RegionalAbundance
Table Traits