Publications by authors named "Maaike Y Bader"

Premise: Bryophytes and lichens have important functional roles in many ecosystems. Insight into their CO -exchange responses to climatic conditions is essential for understanding current and predicting future productivity and biomass patterns, but responses are hard to quantify at time scales beyond instantaneous measurements. We present PoiCarb 1.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Premise: Moss sporophytes differ strongly in size and biomass partitioning, potentially reflecting reproductive and dispersal strategies. Understanding how sporophyte traits are coordinated is essential for understanding moss functioning and evolution. This study aimed to answer: (1) how the size and proportions of the sporophyte differ between moss species with and without a prominent central strand in the seta, (2) how anatomical and morphological traits of the seta are related, and (3) how sporophytic biomass relates to gametophytic biomass and nutrient concentrations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Nonvascular photoautotrophs (NVP), including bryophytes, lichens, terrestrial algae, and cyanobacteria, are increasingly recognized as being essential to ecosystem functioning in many regions of the world. Current research suggests that climate change may pose a substantial threat to NVP, but the extent to which this will affect the associated ecosystem functions and services is highly uncertain. Here, we propose a research agenda to address this urgent question, focusing on physiological and ecological processes that link NVP to ecosystem functions while also taking into account the substantial taxonomic diversity across multiple ecosystem types.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Future climate-change effects on plant growth are most effectively studied using microclimate-manipulation experiments, the design of which has seen much advance in recent years. For tropical forests, however, such experiments are particularly hard to install and have hence not been widely used. We present a system of active heating and CO fertilization for use in tropical forest understoreys, where passive heating is not possible.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Research discusses how current global climate models are based on air temperatures but fail to capture the soil temperatures beneath vegetation where many species thrive.
  • New global maps present soil temperature and bioclimatic variables at 1-km resolution for specific depths, revealing that mean annual soil temperatures can differ significantly from air temperatures by up to 10°C.
  • The findings indicate that relying on air temperature could misrepresent climate impacts on ecosystems, especially in colder regions, highlighting the need for more precise soil temperature data for ecological studies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Current analyses and predictions of spatially explicit patterns and processes in ecology most often rely on climate data interpolated from standardized weather stations. This interpolated climate data represents long-term average thermal conditions at coarse spatial resolutions only. Hence, many climate-forcing factors that operate at fine spatiotemporal resolutions are overlooked.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Atacama Desert is the driest non-polar desert on Earth, presenting precarious conditions for biological activity. In the arid coastal belt, life is restricted to areas with fog events that cause almost daily wet-dry cycles. In such an area, we discovered a hitherto unknown and unique ground covering biocenosis dominated by lichens, fungi, and algae attached to grit-sized (~6 mm) quartz and granitoid stones.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In vascular plants, there is a clear coupling between traits related to water and traits related to carbon economics. For bryophytes this coupling has been little studied but is expected to be strong, because in these poikilohydric plants photosynthesis varies strongly with water availability. We hypothesized that there is a trade-off between water-holding and photosynthetic capacities for mosses, resulting in a limited spectrum of possible trait combinations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bryophyte communities can exhibit similar structural and taxonomic diversity as vascular plant communities, just at a smaller scale. Whether the physiological diversity can be similarly diverse, and whether it can explain local abundance patterns is unknown, due to a lack of community-wide studies of physiological traits. This study re-analyzed data on photosynthesis-related traits (including the nitrogen, phosphorus and chlorophyll concentrations, photosynthetic capacities, and photosynthetic nutrient use efficiencies) of 27 bryophyte species in a subalpine old-growth fir forest on the eastern Tibetan Plateau.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The elevational range of the alpine cushion plant Laretia acaulis (Apiaceae) comprises a cold upper extreme and a dry lower extreme. For this species, we predict reduced growth and increased non-structural carbohydrate (NSC) concentrations (i.e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Premise Of The Study: Tradeoffs among functional traits of vascular plants are starting to be better understood, but it is unclear whether bryophytes possess similar tradeoffs or how trait relationships, or the 'economic spectrum', differ between the two groups.

Methods: We determined functional-trait values [including shoot mass per area (SMA), light-saturated assimilation rate (A), dark respiration rate (Rd), N and P concentrations (N and P), and photosynthetic N and P use efficiency (PNUE and PPUE)] and their bivariate relationships for 28 bryophytes growing in a subalpine old-growth fir forest on the eastern Tibetan Plateau. Trait values and scaling relationships of these bryophytes were compared with data for vascular plant leaves from the Global Plant Trait Network (GLOPNET) dataset.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

On a global scale, temperature is the main determinant of arctic and alpine treeline position. However on a local scale, treeline form and position vary considerably due to other climatic factors, tree species ecology and life-stage-dependent responses. For treelines to advance poleward or uphill, the first steps are germination and seedling establishment.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

At alpine treeline, trees give way to low-stature alpine vegetation. The main reason may be that tree canopies warm up less in the sun and experience lower average temperatures than alpine vegetation. Low growth temperatures limit tissue formation more than carbon gain, but whether this mechanism universally determines potential treeline elevations is the subject of debate.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Aims: There is a conspicuous increase of poikilohydric organisms (mosses, liverworts and macrolichens) with altitude in the tropics. This study addresses the hypothesis that the lack of bryophytes in the lowlands is due to high-temperature effects on the carbon balance. In particular, it is tested experimentally whether temperature responses of CO(2)-exchange rates would lead to higher respiratory carbon losses at night, relative to potential daily gains, in lowland compared with lower montane forests.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Notice

Message: fwrite(): Write of 34 bytes failed with errno=28 No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 272

Backtrace:

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_write_close(): Failed to write session data using user defined save handler. (session.save_path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Unknown

Line Number: 0

Backtrace: