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36 results for “Plant recruitment”
Plant recruitment and seed quality in the Black Sand extended growing season experiment for East Knoll, Audubon, Lefty, and Trough sites, 2018 - 2020.
As a result of climate change, the Rocky Mountain Front Range is experiencing warmer summers and earlier snowmelt. Due to the importance of snow for regulating soil temperature, growing season length, and available moisture in alpine ecosystems, even small shifts in the snow-free period could have large impacts. The focus of the Black Sand Extended Growing Season Length Experiment is to examine how terrain-related differences in climate exposure influence the way alpine habitats respond to climate change via earlier snowmelt. To simulate how climate exposure may affect plant communities, NWT LTER researchers established 5 experimental sites, each containing a pair 10 x 40m rectangular plots. These sites include north and south facing aspects, subalpine and alpine tundra meadows and a range of hydrological conditions (e.g. dry meadows, moist meadows, wet meadows). We accelerated snowmelt in one plot at each site by adding chemically inert black sand, while keeping the second plot as an unmanipulated control; black sand was added to control plots after snow had naturally melted. We used open top warming chambers (OTCs) to increase summer temperature in three subplots within each of the 10 x 40 m plots. This dataset includes measurements of plant recruitment and seed quality.
Data from: Climate warming drives Himalayan alpine plant growth and recruitment dynamics
<ul> <li>Understanding how climate influences plant reproduction and growth at contrasting range limits is crucial for predicting how species' ranges may shift in response to ongoing climate change. Trees and shrubs have shown warming-induced increases in performance at upper elevation limits but reduced performance at lower distributional limits due to warming-driven drought limitation. Whether these differential responses are also valid for alpine forbs exposed to accelerated warming remains largely unknown.<b> </b> </li> <li>We examined climate signal recorded in annual growth and recruitment over the past sixty years in the alpine forb <i>Potentilla pamirica</i> in Western Himalayas, and tested whether the responses to recent climate warming differ between dry steppe, wet alpine and cold subnival zone within the species 5250-5900 m elevation range. We reconstructed recruitment and growth chronologies from 1019 individuals spanning 1-73 years, and more than 21,500 annual growth rings.</li> <li>We identified contrasting climatic controls of recruitment and growth at opposite elevation range margins, as well as contrasting demographic trends identified from age distributions. In lower-elevation steppes, recruitment increased with high late-winter snowfall and decreased with high summer temperatures, while growth increased with high summer precipitation. Conversely, warm winters and summers in higher-elevation alpine and subnival zones support growth and recruitment, while snowy winters reduce them, especially at their upper elevation limit. The age distribution revealed greater numbers of younger individuals, indicating healthy growing populations, in the alpine habitat, while evidence of ageing plant populations was observed in steppe and subnival zones.</li> <li>Accelerated warming since the 1990s reduced growth and recruitment in dry steppes while supporting plant performance in the alpine habitat. The recruitment in the subnival zone did not peak during the past warmest decade due to concomitant extreme snowfall events. </li> <li>Synthesis: Our results bring novel information on population-specific climate dependency of plant recruitment, growth, and population dynamics, suggesting a high vulnerability of high elevation Himalayan ecosystems to climate change. This is partly balanced by high species longevity and slow radial growth securing a long-term population persistence. Continuing trends of extreme snowfall events at higher elevations and droughts at lower elevations may lead to species range contraction.</li> </ul>
Data from: Seed size predicts global effects of small mammal seed predation on plant recruitment
<p>We conducted a global literature review and meta-analysis to evaluate whether seed size could predict post-dispersal seed predator effects on seed removal and plant recruitment, respectively. Datasets were built using data extracted from published studies focusing on seed predation by small mammals (see Methods for criteria and data extraction protocol). We found that seed size predicted small mammal seed removal rates and their impacts on plant recruitment consistent with optimal foraging theory, with intermediate seed sizes most strongly impacted globally - for both native and exotic plants. However, differences in seed size distributions among ecosystems conditioned seed predation patterns, with relatively larger-seeded species most strongly affected in grasslands (smallest seeds), and relatively smaller-seeded species most strongly affected in tropical forests (largest seeds). Such size-dependent seed predation has profound implications for coexistence among plants because it may enhance or weaken opposing life-history tradeoffs in an ecosystem-specific manner. Our results suggest that seed size may serve as a key life-history trait that can integrate consumer effects to improve understandings of plant coexistence. </p>
Data from: Functional traits, not productivity, predict openness to seedling recruitment in alpine plant communities under climatic warming
Understanding the degree to which plant communities are open to seedling recruitment is key to predicting how they will be impacted by climate change. We experimentally assessed whether communities assembled under colder climates were inherently more open to recruitment than warmer-climate communities, after controlling for differences in the current climate under which the communities were growing. We then tested whether variation in openness to recruitment could be explained by community biomass or by the plant functional traits of the community. The study was conducted in a climate grid of twelve grassland sites across southern Norway, differing systematically in temperature and precipitation. Along a 2000 mm precipitation gradient, we transplanted turfs with intact plant communities from alpine and sub-alpine sites into 2℃ warmer sites, and measured natural seedling emergence in these transplanted turfs vs. locally replanted control turfs at the transplant destination sites. Mixed effect models were used to assess the effect of origin (cold vs warm climate), biomass, and functional trait composition of the communities on seedling emergence. We further assessed variation in these effects across different climatic contexts (the temperature and precipitation gradients). Communities originating from colder climates were consistently more open to recruitment, with on average 44% more seedlings emerging, than the locally replanted control communities. The higher rates of seedling emergence in colder-climate communities were attributable to systematic differences in plant functional traits, but not in biomass. The colder-climate communities were composed of species with smaller leaves and lower maximum plant heights; traits that may make these communities less effective at excluding new recruits. These trait-related responses were not significant in the warmest sites and did not very across the precipitation gradient. Our results suggest that alpine species lack the competitive effect traits required to make their communities resistant to invasion by novel competitors under climate change.
Data from: Water the odds? Spring rainfall and emergence-related seed traits drive plant recruitment
<p>Recruitment of new individuals from seed is a critical component of plant community assembly and reassembly, especially in the context of ecosystem disturbance and recovery. While frameworks typically aim to predict how communities will be filtered on the basis of traits influencing established plant responses to the environment, assembly from seed is more complex: the responses of seeds (affected by dormancy and germination function) and establishing plants (affected by root and leaf function) can both influence outcomes within a single growing season. This creates a potential role for a more diverse set seed and seedling traits, and for environmental variability on shorter timescales (e.g., seasonal versus annual dynamics), than are typically considered. We followed thousands of individual seeds comprising eleven herbaceous grassland species through the first growing season, seeking to uncover critical environmental (precipitation amount and timing) and trait-based filters on seedling emergence and survival in assembling communities. We saw the biggest recruitment limitation when seeds failed to emerge, driven independently by a dry spring and interspecific variation in seed mass (positive effect) and seed dormancy (negative effect). Seedling survival rates were higher than emergence, with weaker predictive roles for traits like seedling root mass allocation (positive effect) and seed mass (positive under spring drought), and lesser impacts of summer rainfall on soil moisture and survival. Interestingly, most trait relationships were not conditional on rainfall, suggesting water-independent mechanisms of their respective advantages. Although recruitment is a complex process, our findings suggest that trait-based assembly frameworks can be a useful way to anticipate outcomes, particularly if dynamic early-stage conditions (e.g., spring rainfall) and attributes (e.g., seed dormancy) receive greater attention. Given the importance of recruitment for community turnover in the context of global change and land management efforts, this is an area ripe for continued expansion in trait-based and applied ecology.</p>
Data from: Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities
<p>Current rates of climate change are exceeding the capacity of many plant species to track climate, thus leading communities to be in disequilibrium with climatic conditions. Plant canopies can contribute to this disequilibrium by buffering macro-climatic conditions and sheltering poorly adapted species to the oncoming climate, particularly in their recruitment stages. Here we analyze differences in climatic disequilibrium between understory and open ground woody plant recruits in 28 localities, covering more than 100,000 m<sup>2</sup>,<sup> </sup>across an elevation range embedding temperature and aridity gradients in the southern Iberian Peninsula. This study demonstrates higher climatic disequilibrium under canopies compared with open ground, supporting that plant canopies would affect future community climatic lags by allowing the recruitment of less arid-adapted species in warm and dry conditions, but also it endorse that canopies could favor warm-adapted species in extremely cold environments as mountain tops, thus pre-adapting communities living in these habitats to climate change.</p>
Verdú et al.'s datasets on plant recruitment networks
<p>Plant recruitment interactions (i.e., who recruits under whom) shape the composition, diversity and structure of plant communities. Despite the huge body of knowledge on the mechanisms underlying recruitment interactions between species, we still know little about the structure of the recruitment networks emerging in ecological communities. Modeling and analyzing the community-level structure of plant recruitment interactions as a complex network can provide relevant information on ecological and evolutionary processes acting both at the species and ecosystem levels. We report a data set containing 143 plant recruitment networks in 23 countries across five continents, including temperate and tropical ecosystems. Each network identifies the species under which another species recruits. All networks report the number of recruits (i.e., individuals) per species. The data set includes >850,000 recruiting individuals involved in 118,411 paired interactions between 3,318 vascular plant species across the globe. The cover of canopy species and open ground is also provided as a separated file. Three sampling protocols were used: 1) The Recruitment Network (RN) protocol (106 networks) focuses on interactions between established plants (“canopy species”) and plants in their early stages of recruitment (”recruit species”). A series of plots are delimited within a locality and all the individuals recruiting and their canopy species are identified; 2) The paired Canopy-Open (pCO) protocol (26 networks) consists in locating a potential canopy plant and identifying recruiting individuals under the canopy and in a nearby open space of the same area; 3) The Georeferenced plot (GP) protocol (11 networks) consists in using information from georeferenced individual plants in large plots to infer canopy-recruit interactions. Some networks incorporate data for both herbs and woody species, while others focus exclusively on woody species. The location of each study site, geographical coordinates, country, locality, responsible author, sampling dates, sampling method and life habit of both canopy and recruit species are provided. This database will allow researchers to test ecological, biogeographical and evolutionary hypotheses related to plant recruitment interactions.</p> <p> </p>
Data from: Water the odds? Spring rainfall and emergence-related seed traits drive plant recruitment
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Data from: Climate warming drives Himalayan alpine plant growth and recruitment dynamics
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Nurse plant shading is more important than soil fertility for dryland plant recruitment and diversity
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Data from: Functional traits, not productivity, predict openness to seedling recruitment in alpine plant communities under climatic warming
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Data from: Plant canopies promote climatic disequilibrium in Mediterranean recruit communities
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Data from: Seed size predicts global effects of small mammal seed predation on plant recruitment
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Data from: Environmental context determines the limiting demographic processes for plant recruitment across a species' elevational range
<p>Plant recruitment is a multi-stage process determining population dynamics and species distributions. Still, we have limited understanding of how the successive demographic processes depend on the environmental context across species' distributional ranges. We conducted a large-scale transplant experiment to study recruitment of <i>Pinus cembra</i> over six years. We quantified the effects of environmental conditions on four demographic processes and identified the most limiting across and beyond the pines' elevational range over several years. Realized transition probabilities of the demographic processes varied substantially across the species' distributional range. Seed deposition decreased from the lower to the upper elevational range margin by 90 %, but this reduction was offset by increased seed germination and seedling survival. Dispersal limitation at the upper range margin potentially stems from unsuitable seed caching conditions for the animal seed disperser, whereas increased seed germination might result from enemy escape from fungal pathogens and favourable abiotic conditions at the upper range margin. Our multi-year experiment demonstrates that environmental context is decisive for the local relevance of particular demographic processes. We conclude that experimental studies identifying the limiting demographic processes controlling species distributions are key for projecting future range dynamics of plants.</p>
Herbivores reduce seedling recruitment in alpine plant communities
<p>Through changes in climate and other environmental factors, alpine tundra ecosystems are subject to increased cover of erect shrubs, reduced predictability of rodent dynamics, and changes in wild and domesticated herbivore densities. To predict the dynamics of these ecosystems, we need to understand how these simultaneous changes affect alpine vegetation. In the long term, vegetation dynamics may depend critically on seedling recruitment. To study drivers of alpine plant seedling recruitment, we set up a field experiment where we manipulated the opportunity for plant-plant interactions through vegetation removal and introduction of willow transplants, the occurrence of herbivory through caging of plots, and then sowed 14 species into the plots. We replicated the experiment in three common alpine vegetation types (heath, meadow, and willow shrub) and recorded seedling emergence and survival over five years. Strong effects of vegetation removal and substantial differences in recruitment among dominant vegetation types suggested important effects of local vegetation on the recruitment success of vascular-plant seedlings. Similarly, herbivore exclusion had strong positive effects on recruitment success. This effect arose primarily via reduced seedling mortality in plots from which herbivores had been experimentally excluded and became noticeably stronger over time. In contrast, we detected no consistent effects of experimental willow shrub introduction on seedling recruitment. These results demonstrate that large and small herbivores can affect alpine plant seedling recruitment negatively by trampling and feeding on seedlings. Importantly, the effects became stronger over time, suggesting that effects of herbivory on seedling recruitment accumulates over time and may relate to recruitment phases beyond initial seedling emergence.</p>
Data from: Quantifying niche availability, niche overlap and competition for recruitment sites in plant populations without explicit knowledge of niche axes.
1. Niche availability, niche overlap and competitive ability are key determinants of the distribution and abundance of species. However, quantifying each of these components is difficult because it is not always possible to identify or measure relevant environmental gradients (niche axes) along which species might partition or compete for niche space. 2. We describe a method that uses seed addition experiments to quantify the number of 'safe-sites' (microsites suitable for a species to recruit from seed) at a location and show how this method can be used to quantify niche availability, niche overlap and competitive ability. We illustrate our approach using two seed addition experiments in grassland. 3. In the first experiment, we added seeds of one native and two exotic grass species, alone and in mixture, to plots that were arrayed along a gradient of soil moisture availability. We show that the three species partitioned safe-sites, implying that all three species could locally co-occur through niche partitioning, in part due to different responses to moisture availability. 4. In the second experiment, we added seeds of three commonly co-occurring native grass species, alone and in mixture, to plots with no obvious environmental gradients. One species outcompeted two others for site occupancy, allowing us to quantify both the degree of niche overlap and the relative ability of each species to compete for safe-site occupancy without a priori knowledge of the niche axes. Results from both experiments demonstrate the fine-scales at which species can partition niches to facilitate co-occurrence. 5. Synthesis. By conceptualising a plot of ground as containing a limited number of microsites that are safe for the recruitment of a given species, and using seed addition experiments to measure both the number of safe-sites and degree of safe-site overlap among species, we show how niche availability, niche overlap and competitive ability can be quantified at fine-scales without a priori knowledge of niche axes. Our approach allows questions about niche availability and competition for shared niche space to be empirically tested, and to examine how these processes vary along environmental gradients to shape species distributions and patterns of co-occurrence.
Tri-trophic interactions with avian predators: the effect of host plant species and herbivore-induced plant volatiles on recruiting avian predators
<div> <p><span><span>Herbivore-induced plant volatiles (HIPVs) are important signaling compounds released by plants upon wounding. These compounds have been shown to mediate tri-trophic interactions in recruiting insect predators and parasitoids. Recent work has begun to show that avian species, which were once thought to have a very limited sense of smell, can cue in on these HIPVs to find insect prey. Here, we test the ability for two general HIPVs, methyl jasmonate and methyl salicylate, to recruit avian predators. We test the recruitment efficacies of these HIPVs across 4 different host plant species (black walnut, red maple, cattail, and wheat) and use clay caterpillars to quantify predation by insectivorous birds. We found no significant differences in predation between treatment groups across any of our host plants. However, there was a nearly-significant effect of methyl salicylate in black-walnut trees. Interestingly, our results did show a significant effect of host plant species on predation levels. The two tree species, particularly black walnut, had higher levels of predation than the herbaceous species. We discuss the implications of these results and suggest a number of ideas and suggestions for future studies investigating the role of HIPVs in attracting insectivorous birds.</span></span></p> </div>
Data from: Invasive rat eradication strongly impacts plant recruitment on a tropical atoll
Rat eradication has become a common conservation intervention in island ecosystems and its effectiveness in protecting native vertebrates is increasingly well documented. Yet, the impacts of rat eradication on plant communities remain poorly understood. Here we compare native and non-native tree and palm seedling abundance before and after eradication of invasive rats (Rattus rattus) from Palmyra Atoll, Line Islands, Central Pacific Ocean. Overall, seedling recruitment increased for five of the six native trees species examined. While pre-eradication monitoring found no seedlings of Pisonia grandis, a dominant tree species that is important throughout the Pacific region, post-eradication monitoring documented a notable recruitment event immediately following eradication, with up to 688 individual P. grandis seedlings per 100m2 recorded one month post-eradication. Two other locally rare native trees with no observed recruitment in pre-eradication surveys had recruitment post-rat eradication. However, we also found, by five years post-eradication, a 13-fold increase in recruitment of the naturalized and range-expanding coconut palm Cocos nucifera. Our results emphasize the strong effects that a rat eradication can have on tree recruitment with expected long-term effects on canopy composition. Rat eradication released non-native C. nucifera, likely with long-term implications for community composition, potentially necessitating future management interventions. Eradication, nevertheless, greatly benefitted recruitment of native tree species. If this pattern persists over time, we expect long-term benefits for flora and fauna dependent on these native species.
Factors limiting plant recruitment in a Tropical Afromontane Forest
<p><span>Predicting how forest species composition may change in response to global change is essential for meaningful management. Which species are most likely to successfully recruit depends on a multitude of factors, but processes operating at the seed-to-seedling transition being especially important. Here we explore how insufficient seed dispersal (dispersal limitation) and ecological filtering of seedlings (establishment limitation) influence species recruitment in an Afromontane Forest. We combined census data from seeds in seed traps and seed-seedling transition plots in a Nigerian montane forest to measure dispersal and establishment limitation across species, life history strategies and seed sizes. From 106 seed traps and 318 seedling plots we recorded 11,278 seeds from 38 species and 2,688 seedlings of 61 species. All species except for one liana showed strong dispersal limitation while 23 out of the 30 species showed establishment limitation. The two lianas sampled had significantly lower dispersal limitation compared to the trees investigated in the study. Our results suggest that both dispersal and establishment limitation are markedly high in this Afromontane forest than would be expected in a lowland counterpart. </span></p>
Tri-trophic interactions with avian predators: the effect of host plant species and herbivore-induced plant volatiles on recruiting avian predators
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