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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
Clonal Plants' Traits And Responses Following Fire Disturbance In Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems In The Colorado Front Range, Raymond Erskine
Clonal Plants' Traits And Responses Following Fire Disturbance In Ponderosa Pine Ecosystems In The Colorado Front Range, Raymond Erskine
Master's Theses
Mountain ecosystems are currently experiencing increasing impacts of disturbances (e.g., wildfire) due to global changes in climate and land use, leading to significant changes in vegetation composition and landscape dynamics. Clonal plants, characterized by their vegetative reproduction strategies, offer a range of ecologically important traits to cope with disturbances. However, clonality is often excluded in studies of post-fire vegetation dynamics in mountain ecosystems, and our knowledge of the ability of clonal plants to respond to differing disturbance regimes is limited. Therefore, I examined the response of understory vegetation following fire disturbance in burned and unburned ponderosa pine stands of the …
Clonal Growth And Trait Variation In The Colorado Front Range: The Influence Of Elevation And Ecosystem, Jordan Conley
Clonal Growth And Trait Variation In The Colorado Front Range: The Influence Of Elevation And Ecosystem, Jordan Conley
Master's Theses
Amid global climate change, exploring adaptive strategies among alpine flora, particularly through clonal growth, becomes critical for biodiversity conservation. This study aims to explore the patterns of dominance and distributions among clonal species across environmental gradients in the Colorado Front Range, employing a trait-based comparative analysis to understand the adaptive strategies of alpine flora and their implications for conservation amid rapid climate change. We focused on two species, studying traits like lateral spread, bud count, and bulbil numbers. Advanced statistical methods such as Permutational Multivariate Analysis of Variance (PerMANOVA) and Multi-Response Permutation Procedures (MRPP) were used to evaluate community compositions …