Tuesday, August 4, 2020: 1:00 PM
Background/Question/Methods
Background Resource foraging by roots and mycorrhizas is essential for plant growth, distribution and responses to environmental change. Unraveling the patterns and mechanisms for the root-mycorrhizas relationships has raised enormous and wide interest in but not limited to ecologists. As for roots, their physiology and morphology are increasingly reported to represent two independent dimensions. Briefly, the root diameter-related morphology dimension conveys a shift along a gradient of collaboration with mycorrhizal fungi, and the physiology-related dimension represents the acquisition-conservation tradeoff in nutrient acquisition, i.e., the root economics spectrum. According to such a pattern of multidimensionality in roots, mycorrhizal traits should be closely related to morphology-related root traits while weakly or non-related to physiology-related root traits. Unfortunately, diverse relationships between mycorrhizas and root morphology for one hand and significant relationships between mycorrhizas and root physiologyy for the other hand have been observed frequently. Nevertheless, little endeavor has been made to explain these unexpected root-mycorrhizas relationships.Results/Conclusions
Results/Conclusions Here, by comparing several studies and reanalyzing the data therein, we pose that soil nutrients, climate and species identity are critically important in mediating the root-mycorrhizas relationships. Furthermore, we coin a novel theoretical framework where we can understand how root diameter and tissue density can likely result in diverse relationships between root physiology and mycorhrizas by accounting for the inherent difference between root weight and root length based physiological traits. Together, for comprehensively understanding the root-mycorrhizas relationships, we highlight to study them under the framework of root multidimensionality, and concomitantly considering the impacts by roots itself and environmental factors.