Functional traits predict relationship between plant abundance dynamic and long-term climate warming
Functional traits predict relationship between plant abundance dynamic and long-term climate warming
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DOI：
10.1073/pnas.1310700110
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发表时间：
2013-11-05
影响因子：
11.1
通讯作者：
Cornelissen, Johannes H. C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Soudzilovskaia, Nadejda A.;Elumeeva, Tatiana G.;Cornelissen, Johannes H. C.
预测气候变化对生态系统结构和服务的影响是生态学中最重要的挑战之一。到目前为止，植物物种对气候变化的响应一直是在固定的植物功能类型的水平上描述的，由于植物功能类型之间存在很大的种间功能差异，这种方法受到其缺乏灵活性的限制。将植物物种视为一组功能特征，极大地增加了我们分析生态系统功能以及与之相关的碳和营养通量的可能性。此外，最近组装的大型数据库保存了关于植物功能特征的按物种的全面数据，从而能够对地球上的许多植物群落进行详细的功能描述。在这里，我们展示了植物功能特征可以用来预测植被对气候变暖的反应，在我们的测试生态系统(俄罗斯高加索山脉物种丰富的高山地带)中，植物功能特征解释了每个物种丰度与温度关系的59%的变异性。在这一山区，促进保守叶水经济的性状(单位面积叶质量较高，叶片较厚)和大量投资地下储备以支持下一年的芽(根碳含量)是物种丰富度随温度升高而增加的最佳预测因子。这一发现表明，植物功能特征是一个非常有用的概念，可以用来预测植物群落及其相关生态系统服务的变化，以应对气候变化。
Predicting climate change impact on ecosystem structure and services is one of the most important challenges in ecology. Until now, plant species response to climate change has been described at the level of fixed plant functional types, an approach limited by its inflexibility as there is much interspecific functional variation within plant functional types. Considering a plant species as a set of functional traits greatly increases our possibilities for analysis of ecosystem functioning and carbon and nutrient fluxes associated therewith. Moreover, recently assembled large-scale databases hold comprehensive per-species data on plant functional traits, allowing a detailed functional description of many plant communities on Earth. Here, we show that plant functional traits can be used as predictors of vegetation response to climate warming, accounting in our test ecosystem (the species-rich alpine belt of Caucasus mountains, Russia) for 59% of variability in the per-species abundance relation to temperature. In this mountain belt, traits that promote conservative leaf water economy (higher leaf mass per area, thicker leaves) and large investments in belowground reserves to support next year's shoot buds (root carbon content) were the best predictors of the species increase in abundance along with temperature increase. This finding demonstrates that plant functional traits constitute a highly useful concept for forecasting changes in plant communities, and their associated ecosystem services, in response to climate change.