Contributions of species shade tolerance and individual light environment to photosynthetic induction in tropical tree seedlings

Abstract

Abstract It has long been debated whether tree leaves from shady environments exhibit higher photosynthetic induction efficiency (IE) than those from sunny environments and how the shade tolerance of tree species and the light environment of leaves contribute to the dynamics of photosynthesis. To address these questions, we investigated leaf photosynthetic responses to simulated changes of light intensity in seedlings of six tree species with differential shade tolerance. The seedlings were growing under different light environments in a lowland tropical forest. We proposed an index of relative shade tolerance (RST) to assess species-specific capacity to tolerate shade, and we quantified the light environment of individual leaves by the index of daily light integral (DLI), the averaged daily total light intensity. We obtained the following results. Photosynthetic IE, which is the ratio of the achieved carbon gain to the expected carbon gain, was significantly higher for species with a higher RST than for that with a lower RST. The impacts of light environment on the IE of individual leaves within the same species varied largely among different species. In the three species with relatively low RST, the IE of individual leaves decreased at higher DLIs when DLI < 10 mol m−2 d−1. Seedlings with high initial stomatal conductance before induction (gs50) possessed a higher IE than those with low gs50 from the same species. A trade-off existed between IE and steady-state photosynthetic rates. These results suggest a complex interaction between the shade tolerance of species and the light environments of individual leaves for photosynthetic induction and provide new insights into the adaptation strategy for understory seedlings under sunfleck environments.