No evidence of spatial root system segregation and elevated fine root biomass in multi-species temperate broad-leaved forests
By C. Meinen, Christoph Leuschner, N. Ryan, D. Hertel. Trees, 2009
92 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Differences in spatial rooting patterns among coexisting species have been recognized as an important mechanism for generating biodiversity effects on ecosystem functioning. However, it is not yet clear whether complementarity in root space exploration is a universal characteristic of multi-species woody communities. In a temperate broad-leaved forest with a mosaic of species-poor and species-rich stands, we tested two hypotheses related to putative below-ground ‘overyielding’ in more diverse forests, (1) that species mixture results in a partial spatial segregation of the fine root systems of different species, and (2) that stand fine root biomass increases with tree species diversity. We investigated 12 stands either with one, three, or five dominant tree species (4 replicate stands each) under similar soil and climate conditions for stand fine root biomass and spatial root segregation in vertical and horizontal direction in the soil. Fine roots of different tree species were identified using a morphological key based on differences in colour, periderm surface structure, and branching patterns. In species-poor and species-rich stands, and in all tree species present, fine root density (biomass per soil volume) decreased exponentially with soil depth at very similar rates. Stand fine root biomass in the densely rooted upper soil (0–40 cm depth) was not significantly different between stands with 1, 3 or 5 dominant tree species. We conclude that ‘below-ground overyielding’ in terms of higher fine root biomasses in species-rich stands as compared to monospecific ones does not occur in these broad-leaved forests which most likely results from a missing complementarity in vertical rooting patterns of the present tree species.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/aac57b75fc7bbda39ab7f761ae9169a224115c4e
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In Nature and Landscape Conservation
In Soil Science
Citations in the corpus
- Suitability of close-to-nature silviculture for adapting temperate European forests to climate change (2014, background): “…evidence for complementary use of light (Pretzsch and Schütze, 2005), results are contradictory for complementary use by guest on A ugust 18, 2014 http://forestry.oxfordjournals.org/ D ow nloaded from of the rooting zone (Meinen et al., 2009; Krämer and Hölscher, 2010; Pretzsch et al., 2013).”