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Grassland Root Communities: Species Distributions And How They Are Linked To Aboveground Abundance., Douglas Frank, Alyssa Pontes, Eleanor M. Maine, Julie Caruana, Ramesh Raina, Surahbi Raina, Jason Fridley

Biology - All Scholarship

There is little comprehensive information on the distribution of root systems among coexisting species, despite the expected importance of those distributions in determining the composition and diversity of plant communities. This gap in knowledge is particularly acute for grasslands, which possess large numbers of species with morphologically indistinguishable roots. In this study we adapted a molecular method, fluorescent fragment length polymorphism, to identify root fragments and determine species root distributions in two grasslands in Yellowstone National Park. Aboveground biomass was measured and soil cores (2 cm diam) were collected to 40 cm and 90 cm in an upland, dry grassland …