Lichens from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse

Ruben Erik Roos

doi:10.15468/asarqe

Lichens from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse

Citation

Roos R E, Steinert M (2018). Lichens from a study of primary producer traits across an altitudinal gradient in alpine Finse. Version 1.4. Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), Faculty of Environmental Sciences and Natural Resource Management. Metadata dataset https://doi.org/10.15468/asarqe accessed via GBIF.org on 2018-08-17.

Description

One of the major challenges for contemporary ecologists is to understand how ecological communities respond to environmental changes. Although classifying species to their taxonomy is useful, it has major limitations when it comes to answering ecological questions. A more functional approach, based on a species set of traits that define its performance within an ecosystem, provides much more insight. Many plant ecologists have now applied such trait-based approaches, but these studies are often limited to vascular plants and do not include other important primary producer groups such as lichens and bryophytes. However, there may be clear differences in what drives changes in community level traits across environmental gradients between producer groups: in vascular plants changes in species community are often most important and intraspecific variation is often also significant, whereas recent studies suggest that in lichens intraspecific variation alone drives changes in community level traits. In this study, we will disentangle the relative importance of species turnover versus intraspecific variation as drivers of community-level traits in different primary producer groups simultaneously across the same environmental gradient in Finse, Southern Norway. The % cover was estimated visually in 50x50cm subplots with a wire frame marking out 10x10cm squares. All species covering less than 1% was marked as cover = 0.5 in the data.

Taxonomic Coverages

Geographic Coverages

Norway, Finse

Bibliographic Citations

Contacts

Ruben Erik Roos
originator
Ås
NO
email: ruben.erik.roos@nmbu.no

Mari Steinert
metadata author
Ås
NO
email: mari.steinert@nmbu.no

Ruben Erik Roos
author
Ås
NO
email: ruben.erik.roos@nmbu.no

Kristel van Zuijlen
author
NMBU
Ås
NO
email: kristel.van.zuijlen@nmbu.no

Johan Asplund
author
Ås
NO
email: johanasplund@nmbu

Ruben Erik Roos
administrative point of contact
Ås
NO
email: ruben.erik.roos@nmbu.no