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NUTRIENT TURNOVER RATES IN ANCIENT TERRESTRIAL ECOSYSTEMS

¹ Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06459, USA droyer@wesleyan.edu

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The use of nutrients by plants is linked to a variety of processes that scale from individual leaves to ecosystems. Theory and observations support a scaling in plants between nutrient use and growth rate (Reich et al., 2006; Enquist et al., 2007), and nutrient turnover rates have measurable downstream effects on litter decomposition rates (Kobe et al., 2005; Kazakou et al., 2006; Parton et al., 2007) and ecosystem productivity (Garnier et al., 2004). These are in turn linked to population dynamics (Shipley et al., 2006) and regional biogeochemical cycling (Chapin, 2003). All of these correlated properties and processes offer real opportunities to paleobiologists for placing firmer constraints on the operation of ancient terrestrial ecosystems, but until recently there have been few methods for quantifying paleonutrient cycling rates.

Beginning in the 1970s, plant ecologists recognized the correlation of a core set of fundamental leaf traits: plants with high mass-based rates of photosynthesis tend to have high mass-based rates of respiration, high mass-based concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, low leaf mass per unit area, and short leaf lifespans (Fig. 1; Small, 1972; Reich et al., 1997; Westoby et al., 2002; Díaz et al., 2004; Wright et al., 2004; Whitfield, 2006). This trait axis represents a continuum of coordinated tradeoffs, whereby species investing in leaves with a high leaf mass per area have low photosynthetic rates but leaves are long-lived, such that their lower revenue of fixed carbon per unit time is compensated by a longer-lasting revenue stream (Reich et al., 1997; Westoby et al., 2002; Wright et al., 2004). This continuum is sometimes called the leaf economics spectrum (Wright et al., 2004) and is one . . . [Full Text of this Article]