Plant clonality in a soil-impoverished open ecosystem: insights from southwest Australian shrublands.

ABSTRACT:

Background and aims

Clonality is a key life-history strategy promoting on-spot persistence, space occupancy, resprouting after disturbance, and resource storage, sharing and foraging. These functions provided by clonality can be advantageous under different environmental conditions, including resource-paucity and fire-proneness, which define most mediterranean-type open ecosystems, such as southwest Australian shrublands. Studying clonality-environment links in underexplored mediterranean shrublands could therefore deepen our understanding of the role played by this essential strategy in open ecosystems globally.

Methods

We created a new dataset including 463 species, six traits related to clonal growth organs (CGOs; lignotubers, herbaceous and woody rhizomes, stolons, tuber

SUBMITTER: Tsakalos JL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9851296 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature