Predicting drought tolerance from slope aspect preference in restored plant communities.

ABSTRACT: Plants employ strategies of tolerance, endurance, and avoidance to cope with aridity in space and time, yet understanding the differential importance of such strategies in determining patterns of abundance across a heterogeneous landscape is a challenge. Are the species abundant in drier microhabitats also better able to survive drought? Are there relationships among occupied sites and temporal dynamics that derive from physiological capacities to cope with stress or dormancy during unfavorable periods? We used a restoration project conducted on two slope aspects in a subwatershed to test whether species that were more abundant on more water-limited S-facing slopes were also better able to survive an extreme drought. The attempt to place many species uniformly on different slope aspects pr

SUBMITTER: Kimball S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5415533 | biostudies-literature | 2017 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature