AI Article Synopsis
- Decomposition rates, or how fast plants break down after they die, are affected by both the weather and the type of plants.
- Scientists studied 818 types of plants in different places around the world and found that some plants break down much faster than others, more than they thought before.
- The way a plant lives and grows is linked to how quickly its remains decompose, which helps us understand how plants and soil work together and can help predict changes in the Earth's carbon cycle.
Article Abstract
Worldwide decomposition rates depend both on climate and the legacy of plant functional traits as litter quality. To quantify the degree to which functional differentiation among species affects their litter decomposition rates, we brought together leaf trait and litter mass loss data for 818 species from 66 decomposition experiments on six continents. We show that: (i) the magnitude of species-driven differences is much larger than previously thought and greater than climate-driven variation; (ii) the decomposability of a species' litter is consistently correlated with that species' ecological strategy within different ecosystems globally, representing a new connection between whole plant carbon strategy and biogeochemical cycling. This connection between plant strategies and decomposability is crucial for both understanding vegetation-soil feedbacks, and for improving forecasts of the global carbon cycle.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2008.01219.x | DOI Listing |
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