Lichens from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse

One of the major challenges for contemporary ecologists is to understand how ecological communities respond to environmental changes. Although classifying species to their taxonomy is useful, it has major limitations when it comes to answering ecological questions. A more functional approach, based on a species set of traits that define its performance within an ecosystem, provides much more insight. Many plant ecologists have now applied such trait-based approaches, but these studies are often limited to vascular plants and do not include other important primary producer groups such as lichens and bryophytes. However, there may be clear differences in what drives changes in community level traits across environmental gradients between producer groups: in vascular plants changes in species community are often most important and intraspecific variation is often also significant, whereas recent studies suggest that in lichens intraspecific variation alone drives changes in community level traits. In this study, we will disentangle the relative importance of species turnover versus intraspecific variation as drivers of community-level traits in different primary producer groups simultaneously across the same environmental gradient in Finse, Southern Norway. The % cover was estimated visually in 50x50cm subplots with a wire frame marking out 10x10cm squares. All species covering less than 1% was marked as cover = 0.5 in the data.

当代生态学家面临的一项主要挑战在于理解生态系统如何对环境变化作出反应。尽管将物种分类至其分类学中具有一定的价值，但在回答生态问题方面，其局限性显而易见。一种更为功能性的方法，即基于物种的性状集合，这些性状定义了物种在生态系统中的表现，能够提供更为深入的见解。许多植物生态学家现已采用此类基于性状的方法，但这些研究往往局限于维管植物，并未包含如地衣和苔藓等其他重要的初级生产者群体。然而，不同生产者群体在环境梯度上驱动群落水平性状变化的因素可能存在显著差异：在维管植物中，物种群落的改变通常最为重要，种内变异也往往不容忽视；而近期研究表明，在地衣中，仅种内变异即可驱动群落水平性状的变化。在本研究中，我们将同时探讨物种更替与种内变异作为驱动不同初级生产者群体群落水平性状变化的相对重要性，研究对象位于挪威南部芬塞地区的同一环境梯度上。覆盖率的估计是通过在50x50厘米的子图中进行视觉评估，并使用铁丝框架标记出10x10厘米的正方形区域完成的。所有覆盖率低于1%的物种在数据中被标记为覆盖度等于0.5。