Abstract
Recurrent drought events are becoming increasingly frequent under climate change, yet how perennial clonal grasses adjust their functional traits and recovery trajectories across repeated drought–recovery cycles remain poorly understood. Here, we examined whether exogenous application of methyl jasmonate (MeJA) modifies physiological performance, biomass allocation, and recovery dynamics of the clonal grass Festuca rubra under recurrent drought. Plants were exposed to three consecutive drought–recovery cycles in a controlled growth-chamber experiment with factorial drought and MeJA treatments. We quantified physiological traits (chlorophyll concentration, maximum quantum efficiency of PSII), structural traits (specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content), and performance-related traits (ramet number and biomass allocation). Recurrent drought progressively reduced photosynthetic performance and ramet production, with recovery becoming increasingly incomplete across cycles. In contrast, MeJA treatment mitigated drought-induced declines in chlorophyll concentration and PSII efficiency and stabilized recovery responses. MeJA also altered biomass allocation patterns, increasing aboveground biomass and reducing root-to-shoot ratios under drought, in contrast to drought-only plants, which showed enhanced belowground investment. Post-hoc analyses revealed that MeJA + drought plants differed significantly from drought-only plants for aboveground biomass and several functional traits. Overall, our results demonstrate that MeJA modulates drought responses and recovery trajectories in F. rubra, promoting conservative trait expression and improved performance under recurrent drought. These findings highlight the potential role.
Similar content being viewed by others
Analysis of metabolic dynamics during drought stress in Arabidopsis plants
Melatonin enhances drought tolerance in lemongrass: physiological, biochemical, and antioxidant mechanisms
Growth form and lifespan of herbaceous species mediate the role of traits in short-term drought response
Funding
The study has been supported by the funding given to Zuzana Munzbergova by the Czech Science Foundation (project no. 22–00761 S) and partly by a long-term research development project No. RVO 67985939 of the Czech Academy of Sciences and institutional support for science and research of the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Appendix 1
Appendix 1
Moisture content
Rights and permissions
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Reprints and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Bhatt, T., Thakur, D. & Münzbergová, Z. Methyl jasmonate induces conservative trait shifts that improve drought resilience in clonal grass.
Sci Rep (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-55628-0
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-55628-0
Keywords
- Recurrent drought
- Legacy effects
- Grasslands
- Hormonal memory
- Drought recovery
clonal grass
- Functional traits
- Climate change, stress response
Source: Ecology - nature.com
