Performance of a clonal species in patchy environments: effects of environmental context on yield at local and whole-plant scales
By M. Hutchings, D. Wijesinghe. Evolutionary Ecology, 2007
95 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Yield of the clonal plant Glechoma hederacea was compared at different spatial scales, in heterogeneous and homogeneous environments providing the same amount of nutrients. For the heterogeneous treatments, environments were created with different patch sizes and different degrees of contrast in nutrient concentration between patches of different quality. Total clone yield differed by almost 2.5-fold across treatments, being highest in environments with large patches and high contrast, lowest in environments with small patches and high contrast, and intermediate under homogeneous conditions. Compared with plants in homogeneous conditions, there were significant increases or decreases in yield at all scales of measurement in many of the heterogeneous treatments. These effects on yield reflected a combination of local responses to growing conditions and modification of these responses due to physiological integration with other parts of the plant growing in contrasting conditions, supporting the proposal of de Kroon et al. (2005 New Phytol 166:73–82). The results show that plant yield at all scales is strongly dependent on environmental context, and that maximum yield can only be realized under a limited range of heterogeneous conditions.
Subfields: Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics, Environmental Chemistry, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/601996aac296b841ae69e1a21389aeae909f0e0d
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In Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Transgenerational plasticity in clonal plants (2010, background): “…spatial heterogeneity of the environment and its effect on morphological plasticity has often been studied experimentally in clonal research (e.g., Hutchings and Wijesinghe 2008; Janeček et al. 2008; Thomas and Hay 2008; Johansen 2009; Zhang and He 2009), only rarely (Alpert 1996; Magyar et al.…”