PARENT SESSION
Symposium 23: Comparative plant ecology as a tool for integrating across scales
Organized by: B Shipley
Friday, August 12, 8:00 AM - 11:30 AM, Meeting Room 517 B, Level 5, Palais des congrès de Montréal
Plant functional traits to scale from plant and community response to land use changes to ecosystem function.
LAVOREL, Sandra1, GARNIER, Eric2, VISTA, consortium3, 1 Laboratoire d'Ecologie Alpine, Grenoble, France2 Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Montpellier, France3 EU contract, EVK2-2002-00168
ABSTRACT- Plant functional traits are markers of the response of individuals and communities to spatial and temporal variations in the environment, and of the effects of community structure on ecosystem function. Over the last few years, a series of experimental studies on gradients of land use intensity, or on secondary succession, have highlighted the dual role of traits associated with mineral resource economy at the individual plant level for both the response to these gradients, and ecosystem functions such as primary productivity and litter decomposition. These responses and effects were tested over 11 European sites representative of a diversity of intrinsically unproductive conditions (mountains, mediterranean, high latitudes or poor soils). We showed that a set of easily measurable morphological and leaf traits can be used to account for changes in community structure in response to variations in soil nutrients and disturbance regimes. Significant variations in aboveground primary productivity and litter decomposition along these gradients were also significantly related to community-aggregated, i.e. weighed according to the relative abundance of species - values of these traits. We argue that, in agreement with the biomass ratio hypothesis, some of the easily measurable traits tested provide simple means to scale-up from organ to ecosystem functioning in complex plant communities. These can be used to assess the impacts of community changes on ecosystem properties induced, in particular, by global change drivers.
Key words: plant functional trait, semi-natural grassland, community structure, ecosystem function