NDLI: Elevational trends of biodiversity and plant traits do not converge

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Zhu, Yuan Jiang, Yuan Liu, Quanru Kang, Muyi Spehn, Eva M. Körner, Christian
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	When elevational gradients include combinations of different climatic gradients, such as a decline in temperature combined with an increase in moisture, vegetation and plant trait responses are difficult to explain. Here, we used plant species richness and morphometric traits data across steep elevational gradients in the Helan Range of Northwestern China in an attempt to separate general trends (temperature related) from regional peculiarity (moisture related). Based on the floristic data of the Helan Range as well as plot-based data, both drought (at low elevation) and low temperature (high elevation) are associated with low species richness presumably also explaining the peak in diversity at mid-elevation, where climatic conditions are moderate. However, this mid-elevation peak in diversity is not mirrored in trends of plant traits such as leaf size and inflorescence size, which show either unidirectional trends or no change with elevation (with impacts of drought and low temperature perhaps gradually replacing each other). Our analysis illustrated the taxonomic and plant functional type (PFT)-related biases in functional trait studies and showed that consistent patterns only emerge after careful data stratification, with taxonomy (family level) holding more promises than PFTs. Inflorescence size increased with elevation in major insect-pollinated families, a trend not seen in wind-pollinated (graminoid) families. However, the reproductive effort expressed as inflorescence/leaf length ratio increases with elevation in the majority of plant families, irrespective of their pollination system. The fact that these biometric responses to elevation do not correlate with responses in species richness (which peaks at mid-elevation) may reflect contrasting drivers of trait selection and biodiversity. Based on our plot-based data, this analysis also confirmed the usefulness of floristic archive data for testing ecological theory related to elevational gradients.
Starting Page	273
Ending Page	283
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISSN	13850237
Journal	Plant Ecology
Volume Number	205
Issue Number	2
e-ISSN	15735052
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Netherlands
Publisher Date	2009-05-12
Publisher Place	Dordrecht
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Mountain climate Elevational gradient Plant functional types Species richness Flowering Reproduction Plant Sciences
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology Plant Science

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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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