Details of Award
NERC Reference : NER/B/S/2003/00827
Does resource partitioning maintain plant species diversity in nitrogen limited ecosystems?
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor RD Bardgett, Lancaster University, Biological Sciences
- Co-Investigator:
- Professor R van der Wal, University of Aberdeen, Inst of Biological and Environmental Sci
- Grant held at:
- Lancaster University, Biological Sciences
- Science Area:
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Terrestrial
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Science Topics:
- Community Ecology
- Abstract:
- For many years, ecologists have sought to understand the factors that enable species to co-exist with one another in biological diverse communities. Many theories have been proposed to explain this species coexistence, perhaps the most well known be the so called niche concept: the idea that each individual species avoids competition with its neighbour by using a different set of resources. One of the problems with applying this idea to plant communities though is that plants are thought to have very similar needs for a small number of soil resources, most notably for nitrogen, which until recently was thought to be taken up by plants only in an inorganic form. Recent evidence is now showing that plants can uptake a variety of nitrogen forms in the soil, including many organic forms such as amino acids. Also, it is becoming clear from laboratory experiments that plant species differ in their preference for different nitrogen forms. If this is the case in nature, the possibility exists that plants may be able to avoid competition for soil nitrogen by using different forms of nitrogen that are available in soil. There is a certain amount of evidence that this may be the case in some ecosystems where nitrogen is especially limiting to plant growth, for example in the arctic; however, these experiments have only be done on a very limited range of nitrogen forms. Here, we propose to test the idea that coexistence in these arctic communities is related to such resource partitioning for a wide range of nitrogen forms that commonly occur in these soils. We will also test whether plants have to compete with other organisms in these strongly nitrogen limited ecosystems, notably the soil microbes that are know to be effective competitors with plants for nitrogen. Here we test the idea that this competition might be minimised in a similar way to that occurring between different plant species, i.e., microbes and plant also use different nitrogen forms to avoid competition for this limiting resource. We will do this by using state of the art tracer techniques in the field that allow us to see whether coexisting plant species use different nitrogen forms from each other, and whether soil microbes also use different nitrogen forms from the plants This will also allow us to test whether there is a relationship between the dominance of species in the field and the availability of their preferred nitrogen form in soil In other words, the most abundant plants preferentially use the most abundant nitrogen form, whereas rare species use the rarest nitrogen forms.
- NERC Reference:
- NER/B/S/2003/00827
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Small Grants Pre FEC
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Small Grants
This grant award has a total value of £30,976
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| Total - Staff | Total - T&S | Total - Other Costs | Total - Indirect Costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| £15,375 | £3,280 | £5,248 | £7,073 |
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