Impact of Multiple Environmental Stresses on Wetland Vegetation Dynamics

This research quantifies the impacts of climate change on the dynamics of wetland vegetation under the effect of multiple stresses, such as drought, water-logging, shade and nutrients. The effects of these stresses are investigated through a mechanistic model that captures the co-evolving nature between marsh emergent plant species and their resources (water, nitrogen, light, and oxygen). The model explicitly considers the feedback mechanisms between vegetation, light and nitrogen dynamics as well as the specific dynamics of plant leaves, rhizomes, and roots. Each plant species is characterized by three independent traits, namely leaf nitrogen (N) content, specific leaf area, and allometric carbon (C) allocation to rhizome storage, which govern the ability to gain and maintain resources as well as to survive in a particular multi-stressed environment. The modeling of plant growth incorporates C and N into the construction of leaves and roots, whose amount of new biomass is determined by the dynamic plant allocation scheme. Nitrogen is internally recycled between pools of plants, litter, humus, microbes, and mineral N. The N dynamics are modeled using a parallel scheme, with the major modifications being the calculation of the aerobic and anoxic periods and the incorporation of the anaerobic processes. A simple hydrologic model with stochastic rainfall is used to describe the water level dynamics and the soil moisture profile. Soil water balance is evaluated at the daily time scale and includes rainfall, evapotranspiration and lateral flow to/from an external water body, with evapotranspiration loss equal to the potential value, governed by the daily average condition of atmospheric water demand. The resulting feedback dynamics arising from the coupled system of plant-soil-microbe are studied in details and species’ fitnesses in the 3-D trait space are compared across various rainfall patterns with different mean and fluctuations. The model results are then compared with those from experiments and field studies reported in the literature, providing insights about the physiological features that enable plants to thrive in different wetland environments and climate regimes.