Patterns and controls of foliar nutrient stoichiometry and flexibility across United States forests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Plant element stoichiometry and stoichiometric flexibility strongly regulate ecosystem responses to global change. Here, we tested three potential mechanistic drivers (climate, soil nutrients, and plant taxonomy) of both using paired foliar and soil nutrient data from terrestrial forested National Ecological Observatory Network sites across the USA. We found that broad patterns of foliar nitrogen (N) and foliar phosphorus (P) are explained by different mechanisms. Plant taxonomy was an important control over all foliar nutrient stoichiometries and concentrations, especially foliar N, which was dominantly related to taxonomy and did not vary across climate or soil gradients. Despite a lack of site-level correlations between N and environment variables, foliar N exhibited intraspecific flexibility, with numerous species-specific correlations between foliar N and various environmental factors, demonstrating the variable spatial and temporal scales on which foliar chemistry and stoichiometric flexibility can manifest. In addition to plant taxonomy, foliar P and N:P ratios were also linked to soil nutrient status (extractable P) and climate, especially actual evapotranspiration rates. Our findings highlight the myriad factors that influence foliar chemistry and show that broad patterns cannot be explained by a single consistent mechanism. Furthermore, differing controls over foliar N versus P suggests that each may be sensitive to global change drivers on distinct spatial and temporal scales, potentially resulting in altered ecosystem N:P ratios that have implications for processes ranging from productivity to carbon sequestration.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".