Mycorrhizal status is a poor predictor of the distribution of herbaceous species along the gradient of soil nutrient availability in coastal and grassland habitats.

Plant mycorrhizal status (a trait indicating the ability to form mycorrhizas) can be a useful plant trait for predicting changes in vegetation influenced by increased fertility. Mycorrhizal fungi enhance nutrient uptake and are expected to provide a competitive advantage for plants growing in nutrient-poor soils; while in nutrient-rich soils, mycorrhizal symbiosis may be disadvantageous. Some studies in natural systems have shown that mycorrhizal plants can be more frequent in P and N-poor soils (low nutrient availability) or Ca and Mg-high (high pH) soils, but empirical support is still not clear. Using vegetation and soil data from Scottish coastal habitats, and Latvian and Czech grasslands, we examined whether there is a link between plant mycorrhizal status and plant-available P, N, Ca and Mg. We performed the max test analysis (to examine the central tendency) and a combination of quantile regression and meta-analysis (to examine tendencies in different quantiles) on both community and plant species data combined with plant phylogenies. We consistently found no changes in mycorrhizal status at the community and species levels along the gradients of plant-available P, N, Ca and Mg in the central tendency and in almost all quantiles across all datasets. Thus, we found no support for the hypotheses that herbaceous species which are able to form mycorrhizas are more frequent in nutrient-poor and high pH environments. Obligatory, facultatively and non-mycorrhizal herbaceous species appear to assemble randomly along the gradients of nutrient availability in several European herbaceous habitats, suggesting that all these strategies perform similarly under non-extreme soil nutrient conditions.

Clade composition of a plant community indicates its phylogenetic diversity.

Phylogenetic diversity quantification is based on indices computed from phylogenetic distances among species, which are derived from phylogenetic trees. This approach requires phylogenetic expertise and available molecular data, or a fully sampled synthesis-based phylogeny. Here, we propose and evaluate a simpler alternative approach based on taxonomic coding. We developed metrics, the clade indices, based on information about clade proportions in communities and species richness of a community or a clade, which do not require phylogenies. Using vegetation records from herbaceous plots from Central Europe and simulated vegetation plots based on a megaphylogeny of vascular plants, we examined fit accuracy of our proposed indices for all dimensions of phylogenetic diversity (richness, divergence, and regularity). For real vegetation data, the clade indices fitted phylogeny-based metrics very accurately (explanatory power was usually higher than 80% for phylogenetic richness, almost always higher than 90% for phylogenetic divergence, and often higher than 70% for phylogenetic regularity). For phylogenetic regularity, fit accuracy was habitat and species richness dependent. For phylogenetic richness and divergence, the clade indices performed consistently. In simulated datasets, fit accuracy of all clade indices increased with increasing species richness, suggesting better precision in species-rich habitats and at larger spatial scales. Fit accuracy for phylogenetic divergence and regularity was unreliable at large phylogenetic scales, suggesting inadvisability of our method in habitats including many distantly related lineages. The clade indices are promising alternative measures for all projects with a phylogenetic framework, which can trade-off a little precision for a significant speed-up and simplification, such as macroecological analyses or where phylogenetic data is incomplete.

Calcium plus magnesium indicates digestibility: the significance of the second major axis of plant chemical variation for ecological processes.

Plant variation in nutrient concentrations encompasses two major axes. The first is connected to nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P), reflects growth rate and has been designated as the leaf economics spectrum (LES) while the second follows the gradient in calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) and mirrors cell structural differences. Here, we tested in grasslands whether the sum Ca + Mg concentrations is a better indicator of digestibility than LES constituents. Structural equation modelling revealed that the total effect size of N (0.30) on digestibility was much lower than that of Ca + Mg (0.58). The N effect originated predominantly from sampling date (biomass ageing), while the Ca + Mg effect largely from phylogenetic composition (proportion of monocots). Thus, plant variation in partially substitutable divalent cations seems to play a significant role in biomass digestion by ruminants. This finding contests, together with litter decomposition studies, the prominent role of the LES for understanding both fundamental ecological processes.

Plant trait assembly affects superiority of grazer's foraging strategies in species-rich grasslands.

BACKGROUND: Current plant--herbivore interaction models and experiments with mammalian herbivores grazing plant monocultures show the superiority of a maximizing forage quality strategy (MFQ) over a maximizing intake strategy (MI). However, there is a lack of evidence whether grazers comply with the model predictions under field conditions. METHODOLOGY/FINDINGS: We assessed diet selection of sheep (Ovis aries) using plant functional traits in productive mesic vs. low-productivity dry species-rich grasslands dominated by resource-exploitative vs. resource-conservative species respectively. Each grassland type was studied in two replicates for two years. We investigated the first grazing cycle in a set of 288 plots with a diameter of 30 cm, i.e. the size of sheep feeding station. In mesic grasslands, high plot defoliation was associated with community weighted means of leaf traits referring to high forage quality, i.e. low leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and high specific leaf area (SLA), with a high proportion of legumes and the most with high community weighted mean of forage indicator value. In contrast in dry grasslands, high community weighted mean of canopy height, an estimate of forage quantity, was the best predictor of plot defoliation. Similar differences in selection on forage quality vs. quantity were detected within plots. Sheep selected plants with higher forage indicator values than the plot specific community weighted mean of forage indicator value in mesic grasslands whereas taller plants were selected in dry grasslands. However, at this scale sheep avoided legumes and plants with higher SLA, preferred plants with higher LDMC while grazing plants with higher forage indicator values in mesic grasslands. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings indicate that MFQ appears superior over MI only in habitats with a predominance of resource-exploitative species. Furthermore, plant functional traits (LDMC, SLA, nitrogen fixer) seem to be helpful correlates of forage quality only at the community level.