Urban growth drives trait composition of urban spontaneous plant communities in a mountainous city in China
Urban growth drives trait composition of urban spontaneous plant communities in a mountainous city in China
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城市增长驱动中国山地城市自发植物群落的性状组成
DOI：
10.1016/j.jenvman.2021.112869
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发表时间：
2021
影响因子：
8.7
通讯作者：
Qian Shenhua
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hu Linyu;Qin Danya;Lu Hongying;Li Wei;Shang Kankan;Lin Dunmei;Zhao Liang;Yang Yongchuan;Qian Shenhua
城市生态系统以强烈的人为活动和环境压力为特征，过滤了具有不同生活史特征的物种。因此，这些特征为了解物种如何对城市环境做出反应提供了一个重要方面。本文以重庆市为研究对象，通过物种的分类分布和功能性状的选择，验证了城市发展速度对城市植物群落功能组成的影响。结果表明，大多数性状在70个自然种间的价值差异较大，种子大小和叶片元素组成对物种间的功能分化起关键作用。同时，城市生长强度与叶片N浓度、N:P比、比叶面积呈负相关，与叶片C:N比呈正相关。这表明，在城市中心的物种具有一种获取性的营养利用策略，并可能获得强大的竞争策略，从而在那些长期的城市中心受到更大的选择压力的青睐。最后，我们发现城市化作为一个强大的过滤器，往往会减少自然植物群落中具有独特特征的物种的机会。我们的研究提供了对自发植物群落被城市化过滤的机制的见解，特别关注城市增长速度的生态后果。
Urban ecosystems feature intense anthropogenic activities and environmental stressors that filter species with varying life-history traits. The traits therefore provide an essential aspect to understanding how species respond to urban environments. We conducted this study in Chongqing, a mountainous city in southwestern China, and tested the hypothesis that the velocity of urban growth can alter functional compositions of urban plant communities through selection on species’ taxonomic distributions and functional traits. We found that for most traits, their values spanned a wide range across the 70 spontaneous species in this study, and seed size and leaf element composition played a key role in contributing to the functional differentiation among species. At the same time, urban growth intensity was negatively correlated with leaf N concentration, the N:P ratio, and specific leaf area (SLA), and positively correlated with the leaf C:N ratio. This suggests that species in urban centers are associated with an acquisitive nutrient-use strategy and may gain strong competitive strategies to be favored by greater selective pressure in those long-term urban centers. Lastly, we show that urbanization as a strong filter tends to reduce the chance of species with unique traits for the spontaneous plant communities. Our study offers insights into mechanisms through which spontaneous plant communities are filtered by urbanization with a special focus on the ecological consequences of the velocity of urban growth.