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Plant traits, litter quality and decomposition in a Mediterranean old-field succession

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Abstract

Human-induced changes in land use lead to major changes in plant community composition which have strong effects on ecosystem processes. Here, we tested the hypothesis that changes in traits of living plants induced by such changes resulted in changes in the quality and decay properties of the litter produced by the different communities. This was done in the context of a secondary succession following land abandonment in the Mediterranean region of Southern France.

During the course of succession, species with high specific leaf area (the ratio of leaf area to leaf mass), low leaf dry matter content (the ratio of leaf dry mass to leaf fresh mass) and high leaf nitrogen concentration were progressively replaced by species with opposite characteristics. Accordingly, the initial litter concentrations of carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) decreased, while their C:N ratio and their hemicellulose concentration increased with time after abandonment.

Early-successional communities had faster rates of litter decay and N release from litter, but these differences damped out with decomposition time. Nitrogen release from litter was related to initial litter chemical composition, particularly to its N concentration. This also held for litter decay rate, but only during the first 18 months of decomposition.

Community functional parameters (i.e. trait values weighed according to the relative abundance of species) were tightly linked to initial litter N concentration, and thereby to litter decay and N loss rates. The strongest correlations were found with leaf dry matter content, which therefore appears as a powerful marker of litter properties. This provides further evidence that characteristics of living leaves persist in litter, and that some ecosystem processes can be inferred from plant functional traits.

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Acknowledgements

This study was partially funded by the VISTA (Vulnerability of Ecosystem Services to Land Use Change in Traditional Agricultural Landscapes) project of the European Commission (contract no. EVK2-2001-000356). NP-H was funded by the project “Land-use effects over functional biodiversity and ecosystem process: a comparative approach” (A00B03) within the Argentine-French Cooperation Program for Scientific and Technologic Research from the Secretary for the Technology, Science and Production (Argentina), and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France). We thank the owners of the different field sites for permission to work in their property. We are grateful to Georges Billès, Alain Blanchard, Anabelle Dos Santos and Anthony Jannez for continuous help during this work. Helen Quested and an anonymous reviewer provided helpful comments on various versions of the manuscript. This is a publication from the GDR 2574 “Utiliterres” (CNRS, France).

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  1. Natalia Pérez-Harguindeguy

    Present address: IMBIV (UNC-CONICET), CC 495, 5000, Cordoba, Argentina

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, Centre d’Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive (UMR 5175), 1919 route de Mende, 34293, Montpellier Cedex 5, France

    Jacques Cortez, Eric Garnier, Natalia Pérez-Harguindeguy, Max Debussche & Dominique Gillon

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Correspondence to Eric Garnier.

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Responsible Editor: Alfonso Escudero

Appendix

Appendix

Appendix 1 Means and standard errors (between brackets) of physical and chemical properties in each of the plots studied
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Appendix 2 List of species (nomenclature follows Tutin et al. 1968–1980, 1993) accounting for at least 70% of the total plant presence recorded along the transect-line in each plot
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Appendix 3 Litter decay rate K in g kg−1 year−1 (fitted value of K, standard error (SE) and r 2 of the regression) at each sampling time in the different plots
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Appendix 4 Parameters of the linear regressions of litter N content (QN in g kg−1 of initial litter) on decomposition time (QN = a − b × t) for each plot
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Cortez, J., Garnier, E., Pérez-Harguindeguy, N. et al. Plant traits, litter quality and decomposition in a Mediterranean old-field succession. Plant Soil 296, 19–34 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11104-007-9285-6

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