Disentangling the roles of plant functional diversity and plaint traits in regulating plant nitrogen accumulation and denitrification in freshwaters

1. There is a growing recognition that functional measures of diversity, based on quantification of functionally important species traits, are useful for explaining variation in ecosystem processes. However, the mechanisms linking functional diversity to different processes remain poorly understood, hindering development of a predictive framework for ecosystem functioning based on species traits.

2. The current understanding of how the functional traits of aquatic plants (macrophytes) affect nitrogen (N) cycling by regulating microbial communities and their activity in freshwater habitats is particularly limited. Denitrifying bacteria are typically associated with the roots of both aquatic and terrestrial plants and denitrification is the main cause of loss of N from ecosystems. Disentangling the interplay between plants and microbial denitrifiers is key to understanding variation in rates of denitrification from local to landscape scales.

3. In a mesocosm experiment, we varied th...