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Updated: Oct 2, 2025

JenaTron - An Experimental Approach to Study the Effects of Plant History and Soil History on Grassland Ecosystem Functioning
Published on: March 21, 2025
Effects of soil resource availability on patterns of plant functional traits across spatial scales
Yanpeng Li1,2, Han Xu2, Jie Chen2
1Key Laboratory of Vegetation Restoration and Management of Degraded Ecosystems Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Applied Botany, South China Botanical Garden Center for Plant Ecology, Core Botanical Gardens Chinese Academy of Sciences Guangzhou China.
Abstract:
Identifying patterns and drivers of plant community assembly has long been a central issue in ecology. Many studies have explored the above questions using a trait-based approach; however, there are still unknowns around how patterns of plant functional traits vary with environmental gradients. In this study, the responses of individual and multivariate trait dispersions of 134 species to soil resource availability were examined based on correlational analysis and torus-translation tests across four spatial scales in a subtropical forest, China. Results indicated that different degrees of soil resource availability had different effects on trait dispersions. Specifically, limited resource (available phosphorus) showed negative relationships with trait dispersions, non-limited resource (available potassium) showed positive relationships with trait dispersions, and saturated resource (available nitrogen) had no effect on trait dispersions. Moreover, compared with the stem (wood density) and architectural trait (maximum height), we found that leaf functional traits can well reflect the response of plants to nutrient gradients. Lastly, the spatial scale only affected the magnitude but not the direction of the correlations between trait dispersions and environmental gradients. Overall, the results highlight the importance of soil resource availability and spatial scale in understanding how plant functional traits respond to environmental gradients.
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