Traitscape of drought tolerance for Konza

One of the keys to understanding community assembly will be assembling traitscapes for communities and comparing them to global traitscapes. Earlier, I showed how we could assemble a nitrogen traitscape for Konza and compare that to the global distribution to show that the typical Konza species has higher foliar N concentrations and experiences higher N availability than the typical species at the global scale.

We're getting close to being able to do something similar for Konza, but for physiological drought tolerance. We're working to collect all the grass species of Konza and measure their psi-crit in order to compare them to the global distribution. We've only fully measured 28 of Konza's 86 species of grasses, but the patterns so far our interesting.

Part of the power of the traitscape is to understand inter- vs. intra-site importance of environmental variation. For drought, if we expect Konza to be more likely to experience frequent and severe drought than other grasslands of the world, you could expect to see the typical species be more drought tolerant than the global distribution. We can also look at the distribution of drought tolerance at a site and see how that compares to the global range. Means might be different, but if there is high spatial or temporal variability in water availability, a community could encompass a large part of the global range.

Expectations for Konza are a bit uncertain--it's a humid prairie (835 mm y-1 precip), but can experience severe droughts. Within site, there are dry habitats--south facing slopes with thin soils--and wet ones--seeps, riparian areas, and ditches.

The pattern?

So far the global mean psi-crit is -4.8 MPa. Konza? -4.5 MPa.

The global range is -1.4 to <-14 MPa. Konza? -1.8 to -13 MPa.

Here's the pattern of psicrit with leaf width (red = Konza species):

After 28 species, most of the global trait-space is covered. If anything, Konza might be underrepresented in fine-leaved, drought tolerant grasses. I haven't measured Agrostis hyemalis yet, but it's leaves are about 1mm across--we'll see how drought tolerant it is.

I think there's an amazing range of diversity in drought tolerance at a single site. Konza might be an exception, but the diversity in soil moisture availability at a site can be high.

One question that comes up is that if there can be such high diversity at a site, what are the differences in among sites? How important is drought tolerance in differentiating grasslands and contributing to gamma diversity?