Evolutionary concepts Investigating the community consequences of competition among clonal plants

• Main Authors: Laura Gough, Deborah E. Goldberg, Chad Hershock, Nijole Pauliukonis, Martina Petru
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2001
• Subjects: Tundra
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.560.2189; http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/42740/10682_2004_Article_402554.pdf;jsessionid=14ACB771D0F8245B2EC1AB9E584F2329?sequence=1

Abstract. Although clonal plants comprise most of the biomass of several widespread ecosystems, including many grasslands, wetlands, and tundra, our understanding of the effects of clonal at-tributes on community patterns and processes is weak. Here we present the conceptual basis for experiments focused on manipulating clonal attributes in a community context to determine how clonal characteristics affect interactions among plants at both the individual and community levels. All treatments are replicated at low and high density in a community density series to compare plant responses in environments of different competitive intensity. We examine clonal integration, the sharing of resources among ramets, by severing ramets from one another and comparing their response to ramets with intact connections. Ramet aggregation, the spacing of ramets relative to each other, is investigated by comparing species that differ in their natural aggregation (either clumped growth forms, with ramets tightly packed together, or runner growth forms, with ramets loosely spread) and by planting individual ramets of all species evenly spaced throughout a mes-ocosm. We illustrate how to test predictions to examine the influence of these two clonal traits on competitive interactions at the individual and community levels. To evaluate the effect of clonal integration on competition, we test two predictions: at the individual level, species with greater