IMBIV   05474
INSTITUTO MULTIDISCIPLINARIO DE BIOLOGIA VEGETAL
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
congresos y reuniones científicas
Título:
GORNÉ, L. D., Díaz, S. (2017). Intraspecific shifts of xerophytic grasses along the leaf economic spectrum in response to long-term vertebrate herbivory. Inglaterra, Exeter. 39th New Phytologist Symposium: Trait covariation structural and functional relat
Autor/es:
DÍAZ, S; GORNÉ, L.D.
Lugar:
Exeter
Reunión:
Congreso; 39th New Phytologist Symposium: Trait covariation structural and functional relationships in plant ecology.; 2017
Resumen:
The leaf economic spectrum (LES) assumes the existence of a multidimensional space with a mainvariation axis (from ?conservativeness? to ?acquisitiveness?) along which all vascular plants aredistributed. There is debate as to whether sustained herbivory selects for increasing acquisitivenessor conservativeness. We studied whether long-term ungulate herbivory promotes shifts along theLES of populations of the same species. Our study system was the semi-arid Chaco forest-shrublandof Central Argentina, where we identified, for each of six native grasses, close populations subjectedto long-term ungulate herbivory or free from it. In each population, we measured LES-relevant foliartraits: leaf area, specific leaf area, leaf toughness and leaf dry matter content. We found intraspecificpattern of LFT correlation to be qualitatively consistent with the LES. Herbivory led to a moreacquisitive leaf syndrome in all species. In some cases, we also observed a change in slope, that is, achange in the arrangement of traits in multivariate space. This suggests that long-term herbivorycould be changing not only the position of populations on the LES but also the patterns of resourceallocation, involving e.g. differences in photosynthetic rates as a function of differential resourceallocation and metabolic activity.