Joint control of plant ecological strategy by climate, regeneration mode, and ontogeny in Northeastern Chinese forests

Research on how plant ecological strategies (competitive, stress-tolerant, or ruderal) vary within species may improve our understanding of plant and community responses to climate warming and also successional changes. With increasing temperature, the importance of ruderal (R) and stress-tolerance (S) components is hypothesized to decrease, while the strength of the competitive (C) component should increase. Offshoots and younger plants are predicted to have greater R and smaller S components.
Leaf area, leaf dry matter content, and specific leaf area were measured for 1,344 forest plants belonging to 134 species in Northeastern China, and C, R, and S scores calculated for each. Linear mixed effect models were used to assess how these indicators differed among study sites (n = 2), regeneration types, ontogenetic stages, and plant life forms. The two study sites have an average annual temperature difference of 0.675°C, simulating a temperature increase of 0.630°C due to climate warming....