Over millions of years, terrestrial plants have competed for limited resources, defended themselves against herbivores, and resisted a myriad of environmental stresses. These struggles have helped generate more than a quarter million terrestrial plant species, each possessing a unique strategy for success. Yet, as Resource Strategies of Wild Plants demonstrates, the constraints on plant growth are universal enough that a few survival strategies hold true for all seed-producing plants. This book describes the five major strategies of growth for terrestrial plants, details how plants succeed when resources are scarce, delves into the history of research into plant strategies, and resets the foundational understanding of ecological processes. Drawing from recent findings in plant-herbivore interactions, ecosystem ecology, and evolutionary ecology, Joseph Craine explains how plants attain available nutrients, withstand the immense stresses of drying soils, and flourish in the race for light. He shows that the competition for resources has shaped plant evolution in newly discovered ways, while the scarcity of such resources has affected how plants interact with herbivores, wind, fire, and frost. An understanding of the major resource strategies of wild plants remains central to learning about the ecology of plant communities, global changes in the biosphere, methods for species conservation, and the evolution of life on earth.

Preface xiAcknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xvii


CHAPTER 1: The Basis for Plant Strategies 1
Assessing Natural Selection 1
From Single Traits to Multitrait Strategies 5
Quantifying Plant Traits and Strategies 8
Ranking Strategies 9
Synthesis 13


CHAPTER 2: The History of Plant Strategies 15
Nutrients and the History of Plant Strategies 15
Grime 19
Chapin 26
Tilman 33
Laying the Foundation of Plant Strategies 41


CHAPTER 3: Stress and Disturbance 45
Defining Stress and Disturbance 45
Major Causes of Stress and Disturbance 48
How Herbivory Works 50
Growth in the Face of Stress and Disturbance 55
Responding after Stress and Disturbance 61
The Links to Resource Availability 62
Summary 62


CHAPTER 4: Resource Limitation 64
The Concept of Single-Resource limitation 65
History of the Nitrogen Cycle Concept 68
Pulses or Slow Bleeds? 75
Primer on the Phosphorus Cycle 79 Co-limitation in a Post-Liebigian World 80
Evaluating Costs in a Co-limited World 84
Trade-offs in Use Efficiency in a Co-limited World 87
Summary 89


CHAPTER 5: Competition for Nutrients and Light 91
Definitions and Types of Competition 92
Competition for Nutrients under Uniform Supplies 94
How Much Root Length? 104
Interference Competition 106
Competition for Nutrients under Heterogeneous Supplies 107
Competition for Light 109
Synthesis 114


CHAPTER 6: Comparing Negative Effects 119
Comparing Negative Effects 120
How to Measure the Importance of Stress and Disturbance
in Environments 122
How to Measure the Importance of Stress and Disturbance
in the Natural Selection of a Species 130
Importance of Factors at Low Nutrient Supply 132
Importance of Factors at High Nutrient Supply 139
The Relative Importance of Factors 145
Synthesis 146


CHAPTER 7: The Low-Nutrient Strategy 149
Physiological Traits 151
Whole-Plant Traits 169
Effects on Nitrogen Cycling 171
Revising the Low-Nutrient Strategy 173
Significance of Traits in Strategy 187
Synthesis 199


CHAPTER 8: The High-Resource Strategy 202
The Scope of This Chapter 204
Physiological Traits 205
Whole-Plant Traits 212
Effects on Nutrient Cycling 213
Revising the High-Resource Strategy 213 Significance of Traits in Strategy 217
Why the Race Ends 223
Synthesis 224


CHAPTER 9: The Low-Light Strategy 227
Physiological Traits 229
Whole-Plant Traits 233
Effects on Nutrient Cycling 236
Traits under High Light 236
Why These Patterns 239
The End of the Second Stage of Competition 246
Synthesis 248


CHAPTER 10: The Low-Water and Low-CO2 Strategies 251
Water 251
Carbon Dioxide 268
Summary 279


CHAPTER 11: A Synthesis of Plant Strategies 282
Application and the Way Forward 285
Genetics, Pleiotropy, and Plasticity 286
Limitation 287
Competition 289
Defense and Herbivory 290
Mechanisms of Coexistence 292
Biogeographic Patterns and Invasions 293
Global Change 295
Tree of Life 298


Bibliography 301
Index 327