COS 190-4 - CANCELLED - Comparing intra- and inter-specific trait variation in dryland bryophytes across environmental gradients

Abstract: Plants have evolved diverse suites of ecophysiological strategies to maximize their survival across all manners of environments. In vascular plants, trait variation has been examined for many species, across diverse systems, and at multiple levels (i.e., cell to ecosystem) to better understand how individual species respond to environmental variation. Conversely, research investigating intraspecific ecophysiological trait variation in mosses has been sparse. In this study, we compared nine ecophysiological traits of two closely related dryland mosses (Syntrichia ruralis and Syntrichia caninervis). Both species are broadly distributed across the Western United States and globally. Moss samples were collected from 9 populations of S. ruralis and 7 populations of S. caninervis. To understand the role of plasticity in moss trait variation, we measured each trait on field collected and common garden (growth chamber) grown samples from each population and species.
We found that trait associations varied drastically between field and common garden grown mosses. Traits also varied across populations and in many cases this variation was associated with site-specific differences in precipitation. Importantly, we found examples of fixed traits and plastic traits with higher levels of plasticity often associated with extremes in precipitation. Although these mosses are closely related, and in many cases, overlap in distribution, trait-trait and trait-environment associations were not consistent between the two species. These results illustrate the tight link between environmental variation and moss morphology. Dryland mosses have been found to be extremely vulnerable to climate manipulations in experimental settings. Our results suggest that in cases where environmental variation may be less extreme, plasticity should be considered in greater depth for its potential to better align environmental conditions with moss function.