Abundance changes of marsh plant species over 40 years are better explained by niche position water level than functional traits

Yanjing Lou* (Corresponding Author), Jutta Kapfer, Pete Smith, Ying Liu, Ming Jiang, Xianguo Lu, Michael Ashcrof

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

4 Citations (Scopus)
2 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Understanding the factors that determine species’ resistance to environmental change is of utmost importance for biodiversity conservation. Here we investigated how the abundances of marshland species are determined by niche properties and functional traits. We re-surveyed 150 vegetation plots that were first surveyed in 1973 in order to explore species abundance changes over time. We found that the mean water level in the habitats of most studied species decreased significantly from 1973 to 2012. Nine of target species were identified as abundance decreasing species and the other eight as abundance increasing species. The comparisons of seven plant characteristics (niche position water level, plant height, and five leaf traits) showed that the decreasing species had a significantly higher value of optimum water level and marginally significantly lower leaf N contents and specific leaf area (SLA) than those in increasing species. The stepwise regression analysis showed that optimum water level and leaf N were the best predictors of abundance changes of marsh plant species, as well as that the effect of optimum water level was stronger than that of leaf N. Our findings demonstrated that niche properties may be important for forecasting changes in wetland plant communities over time
Original languageEnglish
Article number106639
Number of pages7
JournalEcological Indicators
Volume117
Early online date3 Jul 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2020

Bibliographical note

Acknowledgements:
This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grants No.41671109 and 41371107) and by the Natural Science Foundation of Jilin Province (grant No. 20190201281JC). We thank Xiaofeng Xu for the suggestions and Håkan Rydin for the comments on the manuscript.

Keywords

  • species abundance
  • environmental change
  • optimum water level
  • leaf traits
  • vegetation resurvey
  • wetland
  • Optimum water level
  • Species abundance
  • Leaf traits
  • Environmental change
  • Vegetation resurvey
  • Wetland
  • ECOLOGICAL NICHE
  • LIFE-HISTORY TRAITS
  • CLIMATE-CHANGE
  • VULNERABILITY
  • SHIFTS
  • DISTRIBUTIONS
  • SANJIANG PLAIN
  • NITROGEN
  • DIVERSITY
  • EXTINCTION

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