Institute of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Aberdeen, 23 St Machar Drive, Aberdeen, AB24 3UU, UK.
Environmental and Rural Science, University of New England, Armidale, 2351, NSW, Australia.
New Phytol. 2019 Mar;221(4):1853-1865. doi: 10.1111/nph.15444. Epub 2018 Sep 20.
Plant functional traits regulate ecosystem functions but little is known about how co-occurring gradients of land use and edaphic conditions influence their expression. We test how gradients of logging disturbance and soil properties relate to community-weighted mean traits in logged and old-growth tropical forests in Borneo. We studied 32 physical, chemical and physiological traits from 284 tree species in eight 1 ha plots and measured long-term soil nutrient supplies and plant-available nutrients. Logged plots had greater values for traits that drive carbon capture and growth, whilst old-growth forests had greater values for structural and persistence traits. Although disturbance was the primary driver of trait expression, soil nutrients explained a statistically independent axis of variation linked to leaf size and nutrient concentration. Soil characteristics influenced trait expression via nutrient availability, nutrient pools, and pH. Our finding, that traits have dissimilar responses to land use and soil resource availability, provides robust evidence for the need to consider the abiotic context of logging when predicting plant functional diversity across human-modified tropical forests. The detection of two independent axes was facilitated by the measurement of many more functional traits than have been examined in previous studies.
植物功能特性调节生态系统功能，但人们对于土地利用和土壤条件的共存梯度如何影响其表达知之甚少。我们检验了在婆罗洲的已采伐和原始热带森林中，采伐干扰和土壤特性梯度与群落加权平均特性之间的关系。我们从八个 1 公顷的样地中的 284 个树种中研究了 32 个物理、化学和生理特性，并测量了长期土壤养分供应和植物有效养分。已采伐的样地具有更高的驱动碳捕获和生长的特性值，而原始森林具有更高的结构和持久性特性值。尽管干扰是特性表达的主要驱动因素，但土壤养分解释了一个与叶大小和养分浓度相关的、具有统计学意义的独立变化轴。土壤特性通过养分供应、养分库和 pH 值影响特性表达。我们的发现表明，特性对土地利用和土壤资源可用性的反应不同，这为在预测人类改造后的热带森林中植物功能多样性时需要考虑生物物理背景提供了有力的证据。通过测量比以前研究中更多的功能特性，有助于检测到两个独立的轴。
