Life Sciences Commons^™

Nitrogen Uptake Strategies Of Edaphically Specialized Bornean Tree Species, Sabrina E. Russo, Amy Kochsiek, Jocelyn Olney, Lauren Thompson, Amy E. Miller, Sylvester Tan

School of Biological Sciences: Faculty Publications

The association of tree species with particular soil types contributes to high b diversity in forests, but the mechanisms producing such distributions are still debated. Soil nitrogen (N) often limits growth and occurs in differentially available chemical forms. In a Bornean forest where tree species composition changes dramatically along a soil gradient varying in supplies of different N-forms, we investigated whether tree species’ N-uptake and soil specialization strategies covaried. We analyzed foliar ¹⁵N natural abundance for a total of 216 tree species on clay or sandy loam (the soils at the gradient’s extremes) and conducted a ¹⁵N-tracer experiment …