Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

 

The Importance of Biotic Interactions Under Global Change in the Alpine Public Deposited

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https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/nc580n99m
Abstract
  • The response of organisms to a rapidly changing environment depends not only on the abiotic conditions they experience, but also their biotic interactions. Here I examine the role of biotic interactions in shaping species responses to global change in an alpine ecosystem. First, I use a long-term experiment to address whether plant communities mediate soil microbial response to simulated nitrogen deposition where I find a decoupling of the plant and microbial communities such that the soil microbial community shifts under nitrogen independently of directional shifts in the plant community. Then I characterize how plant-microbial interactions shape the composition of microbes that live in the roots of alpine plants migrating uphill into previously unvegetated areas by examining the effects of alpine plant migrant density and resultant changes in soil properties. I find that bacterial and fungal root endophytes were only weakly shaped by environmental variables shifting with climate change and that the overall explained variation in community composition was low. Next, I present work from a plant community survey to demonstrate that morphology of a habitat-forming species drives differences in beta diversity but not richness. I then use a manipulative experiment to assess how a habitat-forming species informs the uphill movement of a subalpine plant where I find that the habitat-former increased survival. Finally, I assess the implications of habitat-forming species for associated taxa under climate change in a conceptual paper that focuses on the roles of facilitation, connectivity, and heterogeneity.

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  • 2022-04-05
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  • 2022-11-17
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