Functional connection between freshwater plants, ecosystems revealed

BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Researchers have recently made progress in a study on how the functional connection between freshwater plants and ecosystems is affected by global change.

Aquatic plants are key components of freshwater ecosystems, affecting many ecosystem functions such as nutrient removal, carbon sequestration and food supply. Exploring the effects of global change on freshwater plants and ecosystems improves people's ability to predict future changes in freshwater systems.

Researchers from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the University of Oulu in Finland and the McGill University in Canada have jointly published the study in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

They synthesized global plant responses, adaptations, and feedbacks to present-day and future freshwater environments through trait-based approaches, from single individuals to entire communities. They also outlined the transdisciplinary knowledge benchmarks needed to further understand freshwater plant biodiversity and the fundamental services they provide.

The study results demonstrate that in order to adapt to environmental factors such as light, nutrient and flow velocity, there are differences in the expression of functional traits of freshwater plants with different growth types.

Through the simulation study of the ecological niche of two common plants belonging to Potamogeton L., researchers discovered that changes in temperature and bicarbonate concentration in water, caused by future climate change, have asymmetric effects on the environmental fitness and distribution pattern of these two plants, which indicates the complexity of the impact of global change on aquatic plants and even aquatic ecosystems.