Leaf functional traits of plant community with different hydrothermal gradients in Horqin sandy grassland
Plant functional traits could respond to habitat variation and also determine ecosystem functions.Ex-ploring the relationship between plant functional traits and their variation along hydrothermal gradients is of great significance for understanding the relationship between plant carbon and water metabolism of vegetation at com-munity level and the physiological and ecological mechanism of maintaining water balance under different climat-ic conditions.In recent years,there are relatively few studies on the relationship between community level func-tional traits and environmental factors,especially the response of plant community functional traits to climate gradient in semi-arid sandy grassland.Therefore,this study was conducted using a community in Horqin sandy grassland,where the responses of community functional traits to hydrothermal gradients were analyzed.The re-sults showed that:(1)Community functional traits had different changing trends with different hydrothermal gradients in sandy grassland.Community height increased significantly along increasing regional temperature.Community height,leaf area,specific leaf area decreased significantly along decreasing regional precipitation,while leaf thickness,leaf dry matter content,leaf tissue density significantly along increasing regional tempera-ture.(2)Community height was significantly and positively correlated with leaf area and thickness was signifi-cantly and positively correlated with leaf dry matter content.Leaf area,specific leaf area were negatively corre-lated with leaf dry matter content,leaf thickness and leaf tissue density were negatively correlated with leaf dry matter content.(3)Results of redundancy analysis showed that climatic factors accounted for 54.66％of the vari-ation of plant traits,precipitation was affecting the community functional traits of the main environmental factors in sandy grassland.
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