Capital and income breeders among herbs: how relative biomass allocation into a storage organ relates to clonal traits, phenology and environmental gradients.

Perennial herbs of seasonal climates invest carbon into belowground storage organs (e.g. rhizomes) to support growth when photosynthetic acquisition cannot cover demands.

Genome size is strongly linked to carbohydrate storage and weakly linked to root sprouting ability in herbs.

Background And Aims: Several lines of evidence indicate that carbohydrate storage in plant below-ground organs might be positively related to genome size because both these plant properties represent resource sinks and can affect cell size, cell cycle time, water-use efficiency and plant growth. However, plants adapted to disturbance, such as root sprouters, could be an exception because their strategy would require higher carbohydrate reserves to fuel biomass production but small genomes to complete their cell cycles faster.

Methods: We used data from a field survey to test the relationship between genome size and the probability of root sprouting ability in 172 Central European herbaceous species.

What determines root-sprouting ability: Injury or phytohormones?

Premise: Root-sprouting (RS) is an evolutionarily independent alternative to axillary stem branching for a plant to attain its architecture. Root-sprouting plants are better adapted to disturbance than non-RS plants, and their vigor is frequently boosted by biomass removal. Nevertheless, RS plants are rarer than plants that are not root-sprouters, possibly because they must overcome developmental barriers such as intrinsic phytohormonal balance or because RS ability is conditioned by injury to the plant body.

Variability in mycorrhizal status of plant species is much larger within than between plots in grassland and coastal habitats.

Community-level studies linking plant mycorrhizal status to environment usually do not account for within-plot mycorrhizal status variability; thus, patterns of plant mycorrhizal status diversity are largely unknown. Here, we assessed the relative importance of within- and between-plot variability components in mycorrhizal status and examined how plant mycorrhizal status diversity is related to soil nutrient availability. We hypothesised larger between-plot variability in mycorrhizal status and higher plant mycorrhizal status diversity in P-poor soils.