Record Details
Phenology and Productivity of C₃ and C₄ Grasslands in Hawaii
ScholarsArchive at Oregon State University
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Title | Phenology and Productivity of C₃ and C₄ Grasslands in Hawaii |
| Names |
Pau, Stephanie
(creator) Still, Christopher J. (creator) |
| Date Issued | 2014-10-07 (iso8601) |
| Note | This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the author(s) and published by the Public Library of Science. The published article can be found at: http://www.plosone.org/. |
| Abstract | Grasslands account for a large proportion of global terrestrial productivity and play a critical role in carbon and water cycling. Within grasslands, photosynthetic pathway is an important functional trait yielding different rates of productivity along environmental gradients. Recently, C₃-C₄ sorting along spatial environmental gradients has been reassessed by controlling for confounding traits in phylogenetically structured comparisons. C₃ and C₄ grasses should sort along temporal environmental gradients as well, resulting in differing phenologies and growing season lengths. Here we use 10 years of satellite data (NDVI) to examine the phenology and greenness (as a proxy for productivity) of C₃ and C₄ grass habitats, which reflect differences in both environment and plant physiology. We perform phylogenetically structured comparisons based on 3,595 digitized herbarium collections of 152 grass species across the Hawaiian Islands. Our results show that the clade identity of grasses captures differences in their habitats better than photosynthetic pathway. Growing season length (GSL) and associated productivity (GSP) were not significantly different when considering photosynthetic type alone, but were indeed different when considering photosynthetic type nested within clade. The relationship between GSL and GSP differed most strongly between C₃ clade habitats, and not between C₃-C₄ habitats. Our results suggest that accounting for the interaction between phylogeny and photosynthetic pathway can help improve predictions of productivity, as commonly used C₃-C₄ classifications are very broad and appear to mask important diversity in grassland ecosystem functions. |
| Genre | Article |
| Access Condition | http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/us/ |
| Identifier | Pau, S., Still, C. J. (2014). Phenology and Productivity of C₃ and C₄ Grasslands in Hawaii. PLoS ONE, 9(10), e107396. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107396 |
