Soil conditions drive belowground trait space in temperate agricultural grasslands

Abstract

1. Plant belowground organs perform essential functions, including water and nutrient uptake, anchorage, vegetative reproduction and recruitment of mutualistic soil microbiota. Determining how belowground traits jointly determine dimensions of the trait space and how these dimensions are linked to environmental conditions would further advance our understanding of plant functioning and community assembly.

2. Here, we investigated belowground plant-trait dimensionality and its variation along 10 soil and land-use parameters in 150 temperate grasslands plots. We used eight belowground traits collected in greenhouse and common garden experiments, as well as bud-bank size and specific leaf area from databases, for a total of 313 species, to calculate community weighted means (CWMs).

3. Using PCA, we found that about 55% of variance in CWMs was explained by two main dimensions, corresponding to a mycorrhizal ‘collaboration’ and a resource ‘conservation’ gradient. Frequently overlooked traits such as rooting depth, bud-bank size and root branching intensity were largely integrated in this bidimensional trait space. The two plant-strategy gradients were partially dependent on each other, with ‘outsourcing’ communities along the collaboration gradient being more often ‘slow’. These ‘outsourcing’ communities were also more often deep-rooting, and associated with soil parameters, such as low moisture and sand content, high topsoil pH, high C:N and low δ15N. ‘Slow’ communities had large bud-banks and were associated with low land-use intensity, high topsoil pH, and low nitrate but high ammonium concentrations in the soil. We did not find a substantial role of phosphorus-availability as an indicator along the ‘collaboration’ gradient.

4. In conclusion, the ‘collaboration’ and ‘conservation’ gradients previously identified at the species level scale up to community level in grasslands, encompass more traits than previously described, and vary with the environment.