TOWARD UNDERSTANDING THE CONSEQUENCES OF SOIL HETEROGENEITY FOR PLANT POPULATIONS AND COMMUNITIES

By M. Hutchings, E. John, D. Wijesinghe. 2003

347 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several recent studies demonstrate that yield of individual plants, and their allocation of biomass between roots and shoots, can be profoundly affected by the pattern of supply of soil-based resources. Patchy provision of soil-based resources can affect the location of root biomass, as roots often proliferate in nutrient-rich patches. Root system size is important in determining whether plants access nutrient-rich patches, and the proportion of root systems located within such patches. This proportion will alter as growth proceeds. Species with small root systems have a limited ability to place roots in nutrient-rich patches even when they are very close. Of four species with different root system sizes, the growth of the species with the smallest root system was significantly limited by being located in nutrient-poor substrate even when nutrient-rich substrate was only 3.5 cm away, whereas three species with larger root systems were not disadvantaged. Both in the laboratory and in the field, root density is higher in nutrient-rich patches, and such patches can contain roots of many plants. Recent work showing that plants can respond to non-self roots sharing the same nutrient supply suggests that competition will be more severe in nutritionally patchy substrates than in homogeneous environments with the same overall nutrient supply. Taken together, these facts lead to the prediction that inter- and intraspecific plant interactions will be influenced by patterns of nutrient supply. We present evidence supporting this prediction, and indicating that population and community structure are also affected by patterns of nutrient supply. Significant differences in population yield, plant size distribution, and mortality have been recorded between populations growing under patchy and uniform conditions. Plant communities grown from identical seed inocula, with the same overall nutrient supply, provided in different spatial and temporal patterns, differed by up to 44% in total biomass, up to 70% in root biomass, and differed in species composition. These significant effects of heterogeneous resource supply on plants merit further detailed study. We present a framework of predictions of the impacts of different types of spatial heterogeneity in nutrient supply on the performance of single plants, and on plant interactions, plant populations, and plant communities.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20f9c61631aca13fa2b5b30bc19584520a5deeb0

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Citations in the corpus

Direct and indirect effects of nitrogen deposition on species composition change in calcareous grasslands (2011, background): “media are regarded as poor competitors (Leishman, 1999; Dixon, 2002; Hutchings et al., 2003) and for C.”
Irradiance and oak seedling survival and growth in a heterogeneous environment (2007, background): “It is known that spatial heterogeneity in resource supply and abiotic conditions strongly controls individual performance in most species (Hutchings et al., 2000, 2003).”
THE IMPORTANCE OF THE VARIANCE AROUND THE MEAN EFFECT SIZE OF ECOLOGICAL PROCESSES: COMMENT (2005, background): “…variables such as density of consumers (Butler 1989, Ruel and Ayers 1999, Benedetti-Cecchi 2000), irradiance (Ruel and Ayers 1999), heterogeneity of the substratum (Cardinale et al. 2002) and concentration of nutrients (Hutchings et al. 2003), can elicit strong responses in dependent variables.”
Performance of a clonal species in patchy environments: effects of environmental context on yield at local and whole-plant scales (2007, neutral): “Thus, heterogeneity is a potentially important determinant of the outcome of species interactions (e.g., Day et al. 2003) and of community composition (Hutchings et al. 2003; Wijesinghe et al. 2005).”
Patterns in intraspecific variation in root traits are species‐specific along an elevation gradient (2020, background): “These results emphasise the necessity to better characterise the microenvironment of the roots sampled, for example by measuring soil resource availability and bulk density, the density and identity of neighbouring plants, and microbial properties, such as mycorrhizal or decomposer community composi”
Growing Plantation Forests (2010, background): “If one species is physiologically better able to take up water and nutrients from the soil, it will be able to obtain a disproportionately large proportion of those resources (Hutchings et al. 2003).”
The effects of spatial pattern of nutrient supply on yield, structure and mortality in plant populations (2003, background): “Possible reasons are that the scale of heterogeneity used may have been inappropriate for the species investigated to respond to (Wijesinghe et al. 2001; Hutchings et al. 2003), or that growth had become resource-limited.”
Postfire environmental conditions influence the spatial pattern of regeneration for Pinus ponderosa (2005, background): “Hutchings et al. (2003) demonstrated that population and community structure resulting from plant interaction and competition are highly influenced by patterns of nutrient supply, and that soil heterogeneity is therefore a major component in explaining plant distribution.”
Spatial patterns of recruitment in Mediterranean plant species: linking the fate of seeds, seedlings and saplings in heterogeneous landscapes at different scales (2008, background): “At smaller spatial scales, heterogeneity can be the result of variations in microclimate (Canham et al . 1994; Nicotra et al . 1999; Puerta-Pinero et al . 2007) or soil moisture and nutrient availability (Farley & Fitter 1999; Hutchings et al . 2003 ).”