{"title":"Legacy Effects of Flooding Duration on Growth and Reproductive Traits of Carex cinerascens in the Poyang Lake Wetland","authors":"Wenlan Feng, Pierre Mariotte, Ligang Xu, Luca Bragazza, Alexandre Buttler, Junxiang Cheng, Mathieu Santonja","doi":"10.1002/ece3.71395","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Alteration of flooding regimes due to global change may have cascading effects on plant community composition and associated ecosystem services. Here, we experimentally investigated the effects of six flooding regimes with contrasting combinations of flooding duration (5.5, 6 and 6.5 months) and submergence rate (from 3.3 to 17.5 cm/day) on the growth and reproductive traits of <i>Carex cinerascens</i>, a dominant plant species of the Poyang Lake wetland in southern China. The time span of this study included a summer flooding event and the following growing seasons (autumn of first year and spring of following year) before the return of the next flooding event. The six flooding treatments affected plant traits during the flooding and the following growing seasons, but the different submergence rates under the same flooding duration did generally not show significant influence on plant traits. The 6.5-month flooding treatments had many fewer old (0.4 on average) and new stems (1 on average) than the 5.5-month treatments (8.3 and 29 stems, respectively) at the end of the flooding. The treatments with 5.5 months of flooding had 23% more stems than the other treatments and 26% more community biomass than the 6-month flooding treatments during the autumn growing season. The effects of summer flooding persisted in spring of the following year, but with an opposite trend of <i>C. cinerascens</i> growth traits response to flooding treatments compared to autumn. In addition, the 6-month flooding treatments induced a higher number of inflorescences (39) than the 5.5-month (22) and 6.5-month floods (3). Altogether, our findings highlighted the important legacy effects of summer flooding with some trade-offs between growth recovery (autumn) and resilience (following spring) and between resource allocation to biomass production in autumn and resource allocation to sexual reproduction in the following spring, that were both mediated by flooding duration.</p>","PeriodicalId":11467,"journal":{"name":"Ecology and Evolution","volume":"15 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.3000,"publicationDate":"2025-05-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ece3.71395","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Ecology and Evolution","FirstCategoryId":"99","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.71395","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"生物学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"ECOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Alteration of flooding regimes due to global change may have cascading effects on plant community composition and associated ecosystem services. Here, we experimentally investigated the effects of six flooding regimes with contrasting combinations of flooding duration (5.5, 6 and 6.5 months) and submergence rate (from 3.3 to 17.5 cm/day) on the growth and reproductive traits of Carex cinerascens, a dominant plant species of the Poyang Lake wetland in southern China. The time span of this study included a summer flooding event and the following growing seasons (autumn of first year and spring of following year) before the return of the next flooding event. The six flooding treatments affected plant traits during the flooding and the following growing seasons, but the different submergence rates under the same flooding duration did generally not show significant influence on plant traits. The 6.5-month flooding treatments had many fewer old (0.4 on average) and new stems (1 on average) than the 5.5-month treatments (8.3 and 29 stems, respectively) at the end of the flooding. The treatments with 5.5 months of flooding had 23% more stems than the other treatments and 26% more community biomass than the 6-month flooding treatments during the autumn growing season. The effects of summer flooding persisted in spring of the following year, but with an opposite trend of C. cinerascens growth traits response to flooding treatments compared to autumn. In addition, the 6-month flooding treatments induced a higher number of inflorescences (39) than the 5.5-month (22) and 6.5-month floods (3). Altogether, our findings highlighted the important legacy effects of summer flooding with some trade-offs between growth recovery (autumn) and resilience (following spring) and between resource allocation to biomass production in autumn and resource allocation to sexual reproduction in the following spring, that were both mediated by flooding duration.
期刊介绍：
Ecology and Evolution is the peer reviewed journal for rapid dissemination of research in all areas of ecology, evolution and conservation science. The journal gives priority to quality research reports, theoretical or empirical, that develop our understanding of organisms and their diversity, interactions between them, and the natural environment.
Ecology and Evolution gives prompt and equal consideration to papers reporting theoretical, experimental, applied and descriptive work in terrestrial and aquatic environments. The journal will consider submissions across taxa in areas including but not limited to micro and macro ecological and evolutionary processes, characteristics of and interactions between individuals, populations, communities and the environment, physiological responses to environmental change, population genetics and phylogenetics, relatedness and kin selection, life histories, systematics and taxonomy, conservation genetics, extinction, speciation, adaption, behaviour, biodiversity, species abundance, macroecology, population and ecosystem dynamics, and conservation policy.
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