Most cited article - PubMed ID 31891233
TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access
Due to anthropogenic pressure some species have declined whereas others have increased within their native ranges. Simultaneously, many species introduced by humans have established self-sustaining populations elsewhere (i.e. have become naturalized aliens). Previous studies have shown that particularly plant species that are common within their native range have become naturalized elsewhere. However, how changes in native distributions correlate with naturalization elsewhere is unknown. We compare data on grid-cell occupancy of native vascular plant species over time for 10 European regions (countries or parts thereof). For nine regions, both early occupancy and occupancy change correlate positively with global naturalization success (quantified as naturalization in any administrative region and as the number of such regions). In other words, many plant species spreading globally as naturalized aliens are also expanding within their native regions. This implies that integrating data on native occupancy dynamics in invasion risk assessments might help prevent new invasions.
Following rapid climate change, tundra plant communities are experiencing extensive compositional shifts. A conservation concern is the potential encroachment of boreal species into the tundra ('borealisation'). Tundra borealisation has been sporadically reported, but not systematically quantified. Here, we synthesised data from across 32 study areas, spanning 1137 plots and 287 vascular plant species, resurveyed between 1981 and 2023. We (i) quantified tundra borealisation as the colonisation and increase in abundance of Boreal and Boreal-Tundra species, (ii) assessed biogeographical, climatic and local borealisation drivers and (iii) identified species contributing to borealisation and their associated traits. Half of the plots experienced borealisation, although borealisation rates were not different to random expectation. Borealisation was greater in Eurasia, closer to the treeline, at higher elevations, in warmer and wetter regions, where climate change was limited, and where initial boreal abundance was lower. Boreal coloniser species were generally short-statured, and more often shrubs and graminoids. Boreal species colonised around three times less frequently than Boreal-Tundra species. Hence, our findings indicate that tundra borealisation is mainly driven by the spread of already established boreal-low Arctic tundra species. These plant community composition changes could have cascading impacts on land-atmosphere interactions, trophic dynamics and Indigenous and local livelihoods.
- Keywords
- boreal forest, boreal‐tundra ecotone, climate change, plant borealisation, tundra, vascular plants,
- MeSH
- Biodiversity * MeSH
- Climate Change * MeSH
- Plants * classification MeSH
- Tundra * MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Review MeSH
- Geographicals
- Arctic Regions MeSH
Plant functional trait-based approaches are powerful tools to assess the consequences of global environmental changes for plant ecophysiology, population and community ecology, ecosystem functioning, and landscape ecology. Here, we present data capturing these ecological dimensions from grazing, nitrogen addition, and warming experiments conducted along a 821 m a.s.l. elevation gradient and from a climate warming experiment conducted across a 3,200 mm precipitation gradient in boreal and alpine grasslands in Vestland County, western Norway. From these systems we collected 28,762 plant and leaf functional trait measurements from 76 vascular plant species, 88 leaf assimilation-temperature responses, 577 leaf handheld hyperspectral readings, 2.26 billion leaf temperature measurements, 3,696 ecosystem CO2 flux measurements, and 10.69 ha of multispectral (10-band) and RGB cm-resolution imagery from 4,648 individual images obtained from airborne sensors. These data augment existing longer-term data on local climate, soils, plant populations, plant community composition, and ecosystem functioning from within the same experiments and study systems and from similar systems in other mountain regions globally.
- MeSH
- Ecosystem * MeSH
- Plant Physiological Phenomena * MeSH
- Climate Change * MeSH
- Plant Leaves MeSH
- Plants * MeSH
- Temperature MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Dataset MeSH
- Geographicals
- Norway MeSH
Polyploidy and subsequent post-polyploid diploidization (PPD) are key drivers of plant genome evolution, yet their contributions to evolutionary success remain debated. Here, we analyze the Malvaceae family as an exemplary system for elucidating the evolutionary role of polyploidy and PPD in angiosperms, leveraging 11 high-quality chromosome-scale genomes from all nine subfamilies, including newly sequenced, near telomere-to-telomere assemblies from four of these subfamilies. Our findings reveal a complex reticulate paleoallopolyploidy history early in the diversification of the Malvadendrina clade, characterized by multiple rounds of species radiation punctuated by ancient allotetraploidization (Mal-β) and allodecaploidization (Mal-α) events around the Cretaceous-Paleogene (K-Pg) boundary. We further reconstruct the evolutionary dynamics of PPD and find a strong correlation between dysploidy rate and taxonomic richness of the paleopolyploid subfamilies (R2 ≥ 0.90, P < 1e-4), supporting the "polyploidy for survival and PPD for success" hypothesis. Overall, our study provides a comprehensive reconstruction of the evolutionary history of the Malvaceae and underscores the crucial role of polyploidy-dysploidy waves in shaping plant biodiversity.
Humans have spread plants globally for millennia, inadvertently causing ecological disruptions. Apart from their negative effects, biological invasions provide a unique opportunity to study how species modify their niche when confronted with novel environments. Focusing on the Mediterranean Basin, we assessed (1) which traits influence niche dynamics, and (2) whether niche conservatism or niche shift promotes invasion success. We selected the 80 most widespread alien vascular plant species in Mediterranean Europe and compiled data on their distributions in their native and invaded ranges. We then tested how a species' residence time, biogeographic origin, dispersal ability, functional traits, and intraspecific trait variability (ITV) influence its niche dynamics following invasion. Using already published independent data, we finally assessed whether niche dynamics can explain different dimensions of invasion success (quantified as regional spread or local abundance). We found that niche shifts were common (71% of species) and were mostly driven by species failing to occupy all suitable environments in their invaded range (unfilling), regardless of residence time. Niche unfilling and niche expansion were more important in species with high intraspecific trait variability introduced from non-Mediterranean biomes (temperate or tropical). Niche expansion was also greater in species with long-distance dispersal, a narrow native niche, and bigger seeds. Interestingly, invasion success correlated more with a species' ability to conserve its niche and residence time than with niche expansion. Niche shifts were better predicted by species traits than residence time. For example, high adaptive and acclimatization potential (inferred from high intraspecific trait variability) favored niche shifts in general, and long-distance dispersal favored niche expansion. Understanding how these traits relate to niche dynamics is important since a species' ability to conserve and fill its niche is, in turn, a good predictor of invasion success.
- Keywords
- acclimatization, invasion success, invasive species, niche dynamics, niche filling, phenotypic plasticity, rapid adaptation, species traits,
- MeSH
- Plant Dispersal * MeSH
- Ecosystem * MeSH
- Plants * classification MeSH
- Introduced Species * MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Geographicals
- Europe MeSH
- Mediterranean Region MeSH
Global databases of plant functional traits are facing issues in data heterogeneity and taxonomical or geographical representativeness. To fill data gaps, natural history collections, such as herbaria, have become widely accepted as a potential source of data on functional traits. Surprisingly, root characteristics of plants still have not been studied on herbarium materials. We investigated whether rooting depth data from herbarium samples are realistic enough to be used in ecological studies. We measured original maximum rooting depth records on herbarium specimens and individuals from the field. Global data from the TRY database were also obtained. We tested the pairwise correlations between data from the three datasets. The effect of life form, taxonomic position, and average species height on rooting depth was also evaluated. Herbarium data showed strong correlation to field records, while records from the TRY database showed a weaker correlation with data measured on herbarium materials. Life form, taxonomic position, and height proved to be good predictors of rooting depth collected from the field or the herbarium; however, the model including data obtained from the TRY as the response variable performed weaker. We constructed an equation for predicting realistic average maximum rooting depth values of a given species based on herbarium data. Strong correlation among the field and herbarium datasets suggests that museal collections can be considered as resources of root trait data. Although herbarium-based rooting depth measurements usually represent lower values than field records, the correction of the herbarium-derived dataset is solvable. These corrected data might be more accurate than using large, global trait databases. Herbarium work might be a more sustainable, time- and cost-effective practice than field sampling. The inclusion of herbarium-derived information in trait-based studies, as well as in global databases, can improve these sources spatially, temporally, and taxonomically.
- Keywords
- bias, functional trait, maximum rooting depth, natural history collection, prediction,
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
Trees can differ enormously in their crown architectural traits, such as the scaling relationships between tree height, crown width and stem diameter. Yet despite the importance of crown architecture in shaping the structure and function of terrestrial ecosystems, we lack a complete picture of what drives this incredible diversity in crown shapes. Using data from 374,888 globally distributed trees, we explore how climate, disturbance, competition, functional traits, and evolutionary history constrain the height and crown width scaling relationships of 1914 tree species. We find that variation in height-diameter scaling relationships is primarily controlled by water availability and light competition. Conversely, crown width is predominantly shaped by exposure to wind and fire, while also covarying with functional traits related to mechanical stability and photosynthesis. Additionally, we identify several plant lineages with highly distinctive stem and crown forms, such as the exceedingly slender dipterocarps of Southeast Asia, or the extremely wide crowns of legume trees in African savannas. Our study charts the global spectrum of tree crown architecture and pinpoints the processes that shape the 3D structure of woody ecosystems.
Species' traits and environmental conditions determine the abundance of tree species across the globe. The extent to which traits of dominant and rare tree species differ remains untested across a broad environmental range, limiting our understanding of how species traits and the environment shape forest functional composition. We use a global dataset of tree composition of >22,000 forest plots and 11 traits of 1663 tree species to ask how locally dominant and rare species differ in their trait values, and how these differences are driven by climatic gradients in temperature and water availability in forest biomes across the globe. We find three consistent trait differences between locally dominant and rare species across all biomes; dominant species are taller, have softer wood and higher loading on the multivariate stem strategy axis (related to narrow tracheids and thick bark). The difference between traits of dominant and rare species is more strongly driven by temperature compared to water availability, as temperature might affect a larger number of traits. Therefore, climate change driven global temperature rise may have a strong effect on trait differences between dominant and rare tree species and may lead to changes in species abundances and therefore strong community reassembly.
- MeSH
- Wood MeSH
- Species Specificity MeSH
- Ecosystem MeSH
- Climate Change MeSH
- Forests * MeSH
- Climate * MeSH
- Trees * physiology classification anatomy & histology MeSH
- Temperature MeSH
- Water MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Names of Substances
- Water MeSH
Tropical forest canopies are the biosphere's most concentrated atmospheric interface for carbon, water and energy1,2. However, in most Earth System Models, the diverse and heterogeneous tropical forest biome is represented as a largely uniform ecosystem with either a singular or a small number of fixed canopy ecophysiological properties3. This situation arises, in part, from a lack of understanding about how and why the functional properties of tropical forest canopies vary geographically4. Here, by combining field-collected data from more than 1,800 vegetation plots and tree traits with satellite remote-sensing, terrain, climate and soil data, we predict variation across 13 morphological, structural and chemical functional traits of trees, and use this to compute and map the functional diversity of tropical forests. Our findings reveal that the tropical Americas, Africa and Asia tend to occupy different portions of the total functional trait space available across tropical forests. Tropical American forests are predicted to have 40% greater functional richness than tropical African and Asian forests. Meanwhile, African forests have the highest functional divergence-32% and 7% higher than that of tropical American and Asian forests, respectively. An uncertainty analysis highlights priority regions for further data collection, which would refine and improve these maps. Our predictions represent a ground-based and remotely enabled global analysis of how and why the functional traits of tropical forest canopies vary across space.
- MeSH
- Biodiversity MeSH
- Forests * MeSH
- Plant Leaves physiology chemistry anatomy & histology MeSH
- Uncertainty MeSH
- Soil chemistry MeSH
- Trees * physiology anatomy & histology chemistry classification MeSH
- Tropical Climate MeSH
- Earth, Planet * MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Geographicals
- Africa MeSH
- Asia MeSH
- Names of Substances
- Soil MeSH
Understanding how land use affects temporal stability is crucial to preserve biodiversity and ecosystem functions. Yet, the mechanistic links between land-use intensity and stability-driving mechanisms remain unclear, with functional traits likely playing a key role. Using 13 years of data from 300 sites in Germany, we tested whether and how trait-based community features mediate the effect of land-use intensity on acknowledged stability drivers (compensatory dynamics, portfolio effect, and dominant species variability), within and across plant and arthropod communities. Trait-based plant features, especially the prevalence of acquisitive strategies along the leaf-economics spectrum, were the main land-use intensity mediators within and across taxonomic and trophic levels, consistently influencing dominant species variability. Functional diversity also mediated land-use intensity effects but played a lesser role. Our analysis discloses trait-based community features as key mediators of land-use effects on stability drivers, emphasizing the need to consider multi-trophic functional interactions to better understand complex ecosystem dynamics.
- MeSH
- Biodiversity * MeSH
- Arthropods physiology MeSH
- Ecosystem * MeSH
- Food Chain MeSH
- Plants MeSH
- Animals MeSH
- Check Tag
- Animals MeSH
- Publication type
- Journal Article MeSH
- Geographicals
- Germany MeSH
