Functional Trait Diversity Shapes the Biomass in the Dam-Induced Riparian Zone

Yanfeng Wang, Shengjun Wu, Ying Liu, Xiaohong Li and Jing Zhang
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Yanfeng Wang: The Three Gorges Institute of Ecological Environment, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, China
Shengjun Wu: The Three Gorges Institute of Ecological Environment, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, China
Ying Liu: The Three Gorges Institute of Ecological Environment, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, China
Xiaohong Li: The Three Gorges Institute of Ecological Environment, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, China
Jing Zhang: The Three Gorges Institute of Ecological Environment, Chongqing Institute of Green and Intelligent Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chongqing 400714, China

Agriculture, 2022, vol. 12, issue 3, 1-12

Abstract: The construction of dams has caused a serious decline in riparian ecosystem functioning and associated services. It is crucial to assess the response of riparian plant communities to flooding stress for their conservation. Functional traits composition, functional diversity, and species diversity are commonly used to investigate the effect of abiotic stress on ecosystem functioning and services (i.e., biomass). Yet, how the functional traits respond to the flooding stress along a dam-induced riparian habitat remains unclear, and how biodiversity affects biomass still exists controversy. Accordingly, this study investigated the response strategies of functional traits subjected to the flooding stress and its correlation with aboveground biomass (AGB) in the water level fluctuation zone (WLFZ) of the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR). We found that leaf traits and root traits showed a significant response to elevation, whereas they demonstrated different distribution patterns. Leaf traits showed acquisitive-conservative-acquisitive resource strategies along the flooding stress, while root traits shifted from species conservative resource to acquisitive resource strategies. AGB was found to be positively related to the community weighted mean (CWM) trait values for leaf dry matter content (LDMC) and negatively related to specific leaf area (SLA), but the AGB showed no relationship with the root traits. AGB accumulated greatly in the intermediate species diversity, and we also found a significant relationship between functional diversity and biomass within threshold values. Additionally, Rao’s exerted the most significant influence on the biomass, suggesting that the functional diversity index is a better indicator of biomass variation. The results obtained only partly supported the “mass ratio hypothesis” in leaf traits and mainly supported the “niche complementarity hypothesis”, which suggested that these two theories are not mutually exclusive at the early stage of vegetation community succession with an unstable community structure in dam-regulated riparian zones.

Keywords: biodiversity-ecosystem functioning; flooding stress; water fluctuation; reservoir riparian zone (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
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