Liu Miao, Li Yang, Sun Le, Du Ziyin, Li Wencheng, Zhang Lin, Wang Jinniu, Chen Ji
College of Grassland Science and Technology, China Agricultural University, Beijing, China.
State Key Laboratory of Tibetan Plateau Earth System, Environment and Resources (TPESER), Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Front Plant Sci. 2023 Jan 20;13:1122140. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2022.1122140. eCollection 2022.
It is essential to understand plant adaptive strategies on plant stoichiometric traits at the species level rather than at the community level under various environmental conditions across the Tibetan Plateau (TP).
Here, plant community function and edaphic and meteorological factors were collected at 111 sites along an extensive water-heat gradient during the peak growing season in 2015. Community-weighted mean trait (CWM) was introduced to illuminating dynamics of the functional trait at the community level.
Our results indicated that plant functional traits, including CWM-leaf total carbon (CWM_LTC), CWM-leaf total nitrogen (CWM_LTN), and CWM-leaf total phosphorus (CWM_LTP), showed similar and comparatively marked increases from alpine meadow (AM) to alpine steppe (AS). Moreover, since the tightly coordinated variation among each plant functional trait of AM was higher than that of AS, a more stable coupling mechanism of these plant functional traits could be observed in AM under a long-term evolutionary habit. Specifically, there was higher annual mean precipitation (AMP) in AM than that in AS significantly ( < 0.01), and AMP was significantly correlated with soil moisture and soil total phosphorus in AM. Generally, our findings suggest that precipitation determines divergent coupling plant community function in both AS and AM.
了解青藏高原（TP）不同环境条件下物种水平而非群落水平上植物的化学计量特征适应性策略至关重要。
在此，于2015年生长旺季沿广泛的水热梯度在111个地点收集了植物群落功能以及土壤和气象因素。引入群落加权平均性状（CWM）以阐明群落水平上功能性状的动态变化。
我们的结果表明，植物功能性状，包括CWM-叶片总碳（CWM_LTC）、CWM-叶片总氮（CWM_LTN）和CWM-叶片总磷（CWM_LTP），从高寒草甸（AM）到高寒草原（AS）呈现出相似且较为明显的增加。此外，由于AM的各植物功能性状间紧密协调的变化高于AS，在长期进化习性下，AM中可观察到这些植物功能性状更稳定的耦合机制。具体而言，AM的年平均降水量（AMP）显著高于AS（<0.01），且AM中的AMP与土壤湿度和土壤总磷显著相关。总体而言，我们的研究结果表明降水决定了AS和AM中不同的耦合植物群落功能。
