| Heterogeneity in space and in time is the ubiquitous feature of habitats.Almost all plants complete their life histories in temporally and spatially heterogeneous environments at certain scales.In the evolutionary process, plants may have constituted various adaptive strategies to cope with environmental heterogeneity. In principle, clonal growth contributes markedly to the ability of clonal plants to make use of environmental heterogeneity. The bamboo Fargesia nitida, one of the Giant Panda's main food sources and dominant shrub species of the forest understory, is mainly distributed in the dark coniferous belt (at altitudes of 2450m to 3200m) in western Sichuan and southern Gansu in China. To study ecological strategies of the clonal plant Fargesia nitida to different canopy conditions of sulbalpine dark coniferous forest four experiments were carried out in four different forest canopy conditions, including forest understory(FU),moderate gap(MG), large gap(LG) and forest edge wildernessness(FEW).In order to reveal whether these four canopy conditions affect the ramet structures and to estimate the effect sizes, a field census of Fargesia nitida populations' age structure, morphological traits(culm height, basal diameter and leaf area) and biomass allocation was conducted in four different forest canopy conditions.The main results showed that:(l) At the ramet level ,the performance structures of the four populations were significantly different(one-way ANOVA, P<0.01), and as the canopy cover decreased the mean height, basal diameter and biomass of the populations increased in the order FU |
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