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Red and black spruce provenance growth and allocation under ambient and elevated CO2

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Late-successional red spruce performed relatively better than faster growing black spruce under elevated carbon dioxide; this may be related to species’ shade tolerance.

Abstract

We compared growth, components of growth, and biomass allocation between two largely sympatric spruces, red spruce (Picea rubens Sarg.; RS) and black spruce (Picea mariana (Mill.) B.S.P.; BS) using 12 populations from across eastern Canada grown under ambient CO2 (aCO2) and elevated CO2 (eCO2) to evaluate absolute and relative responses to this increasing greenhouse gas. The 12 populations originated from continental to maritime environments, with seed collected from two proximate pairs of RS and BS stands from each of three provinces of eastern Canada—Ontario (ON), New Brunswick (NB), and Nova Scotia (NS)—considered here as provenances. Over 4 years, BS displayed increasingly greater height growth compared with RS. By the end of the 4th year, BS on average had 127 % greater total mass and 50 % greater root-collar diameter than RS. Bud flush was earlier for BS than RS, and BS bud flush occurred in the following order: ON, NB, NS. Under eCO2, BS and RS allocated more mass to stem (stem + branches), and further analysis showed that 25 % of this difference in biomass allocation was attributable to increasing tree size, with the balance directly due to eCO2. As expected, BS allocated more to aboveground than belowground mass than RS due their respective status as early- and late-successional species. However, under eCO2, BS partitioned more belowground and RS more aboveground than under aCO2. Black spruce had greater growth efficiency (GE; stem mass to needle mass ratio) than RS; GE increased with eCO2, and the increase was greater for BS than RS. Elevated CO2 resulted in a relative biomass enhancement of 10.8 and 18.0 % for BS and RS, respectively. This does not support the theory that faster growing species will have a competitive advantage compared with inherently slower growing plants under eCO2, but agrees with other observations that shade-tolerant species have greater response ratios to eCO2 than shade-intolerant species. Also, despite high possibility of hybridization and introgression between the two species, particularly in the highly fragmented and small remnant populations from ON, the findings show that ON and NB remain true to species type for the major growth parameters, allometry, growth efficiencies, and physiological traits and that the provenance variation is mostly consistent with findings from common-garden studies.

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Author contribution statement

JEM designed the experiment and was lead author, AM and KHJ contributed to the analyses and writing and of the manuscript, MC and JM undertook the processing, organization of the experiment and contributed to the writing of the manuscript.

Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge useful comments received from Bernie Daigle and Ed Swift. We gratefully acknowledge the greenhouse and growth-chamber growing skills of Laurie Yeates and Terry Hay, and the organizational and technical skills of Debby Barsi and Stephanie West are thankfully acknowledged. The financial support of the Canadian Forest Service is gratefully acknowledged.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Natural Resources Canada, Canadian Forest Service, Atlantic Forestry Centre, 1350 Regent St., Fredericton, NB, E3B 5P7, Canada

    John E. Major, Alex Mosseler, Moira Campbell & John Malcolm

  2. USDA Forest Service, Southern Research Station, 1577 Brevard Rd., Asheville, NC, 28806, USA

    Kurt H. Johnsen

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  1. John E. Major
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  2. Alex Mosseler
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  3. Kurt H. Johnsen
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  4. Moira Campbell
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  5. John Malcolm
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Correspondence to John E. Major.

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Communicated by R. Alia.

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Major, J.E., Mosseler, A., Johnsen, K.H. et al. Red and black spruce provenance growth and allocation under ambient and elevated CO2 . Trees 29, 1313–1328 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-015-1209-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-015-1209-0

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