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Water balance affects foliar and soil nutrients differently

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Abstract

Water balance influences soil development, and consequently plant communities, by driving weathering of soil minerals and leaching of plant nutrients from the soil. Along gradients in water balance, soils exhibit process domains where chemical properties are relatively stable punctuated by pedogenic thresholds where soil chemical properties change rapidly with little additional change in water balance. We ask if plant macronutrient concentrations in leaves also exhibit non-linear trends along water balance gradients, and if so, how these non-linearities relate to those in soils. We analyze foliar nutrient concentrations and foliar N:P ratios from eight species that span a range of growth forms along three water balance gradients (three of the species are found on multiple gradients). The gradients are located on basaltic substrate of different ages and have previously been characterized by studies on soil development. We find that maximum concentrations of foliar macronutrients occur at an intermediate water balance. As with soil nutrients, time mediates the effect of water balance on foliar nutrients, such that plants on older soils attain maximum nutrient concentrations at a lower water balance. On both a young, 20 ky and an old, 4100 ky water balance gradient, foliar nutrients reach peak concentrations at a water balance greater than the threshold for depletion of rock-derived nutrients in surface soils. Our findings suggest that plant acquisition of essential nutrients is imperfectly predicted by overall soil nutrient availability because the regulation of internal nutrient pools by plants makes nutrient pools within leaves partially independent of soil nutrient availability.

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Adapted from Bateman et al. (2019)

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Code availability

The code used for this study is available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Amy Kim for field assistance and Oliver Chadwick for assistance with the soils data. Funding for field work to collect foliar samples was provided by NSF Grants ETBC-1020791 and ETBC-1019640, and Stanford School of Earth, Energy and Environmental Sciences. PRA was supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant No. DGE 2036197.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology, Columbia University, New York, NY, 10027, USA

    Palani R. Akana

  2. Department of Biological Sciences, State University of New York Cortland, Cortland, NY, 13045, USA

    Jesse Bloom Bateman

  3. Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305, USA

    Jesse Bloom Bateman & Peter M. Vitousek

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  1. Palani R. Akana
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  2. Jesse Bloom Bateman
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PRA, JBB, and PMV conceived and designed the experiments. PRA and JBB collected the data. PRA analyzed the data and wrote the first draft of the manuscript; all authors helped edit and revise the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Palani R. Akana.

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Communicated by Stephan Hattenschwiler.

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Akana, P.R., Bateman, J.B. & Vitousek, P.M. Water balance affects foliar and soil nutrients differently. Oecologia 199, 965–977 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-022-05244-2

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