Abstract:
Whether species withstand climate change, may depend on their ability to respond to rapidly environmental changes. Quantifying intraspecific trait variation within a population is one manner to assess the ability of species to respond to environmental changes. Species that are able to vary their traits more, generally have a higher capacity to respond to environmental changes, making trait variation an important indicator of species’ ability to survive changes in the environment. It remains to be understood whether invasive species will be able to better respond to climatic changes than native species. Therefore, this study examined how trait variation differs between invasive and native species to understand how these groups of species cope with variable environments, and what their capacity to respond to future environmental changes might be. This was achieved by quantifying the intraspecific variation of five ecologically important traits related to growth, resource acquisition, photosynthetic capacity and environmental stress tolerance of five native and five invasive plant species of sub-Antarctic Marion Island, and comparing the amount of trait variation between invasive and native species. Differences in trait variation were evaluated across two contrasting altitudes, at different habitat types, and across the entire island. The results show that invasive species had higher trait variation than native species across altitude. However, there was no consistent pattern in terms of whether native or invasive species showed higher trait variation between different habitat types, or when overall trait variation was assessed. Overall, it thus remains unclear whether native or invasive species would be better at dealing with climate changes. However, invasive species showed consistently higher variation in specific leaf area, suggesting an ability to better adjust resource acquisition in response to environmental variation than native species. - Abstract as displayed in the - Abstract booklet. The presentation on the day may differ from the - Abstract.
