An experiment in secondary forests in the Democratic Republic of the Congo finds that calcium, an overlooked soil nutrient, is scarcer than phosphorus, and represents a potentially greater limitation on tropical forest growth.
Ecology can reveal distributional patterns and dynamics in nature. One approach used is studying the elemental composition of plants, which has been linked to ecological processes such as growth, diversity or water use efficiency. More recently, elemental composition has been detected as a cofactor in governing the carbon sink capacity of plants, and therefore climate change mitigation1,2,3. This discovery has added an extra layer of urgency to the field, which now aims to better understand and predict global change. The study of nitrogen and/or phosphorus has until now received most of the attention of plant ecologists: nitrogen is the most abundant element in dry leaves after hydrogen and carbon, forms the main structure of proteins and is strongly linked to photosynthesis4. Phosphorus represents around one-tenth of nitrogen abundance in leaves and is key in energy storage and nucleic acids. However, although these represent only two of the many chemical elements that are in flux throughout ecosystems, whether others may have a dominant role in ecosystem dynamics is an open question. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Bauters et al.5 share some evidence to motivate broadening out from the dominant focus on nitrogen and phosphorus in terrestrial ecology, by revealing a crucial limiting role of calcium in the dynamics of tropical forest succession.
Source: Ecology - nature.com
