Nejvíce citovaný článek - PubMed ID 33771870
Erosion of global functional diversity across the tree of life
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.
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
- biodiverzita MeSH
- lesy * MeSH
- listy rostlin fyziologie chemie anatomie a histologie MeSH
- nejistota MeSH
- půda chemie MeSH
- stromy * fyziologie anatomie a histologie chemie klasifikace MeSH
- tropické klima MeSH
- Země (planeta) * MeSH
- Publikační typ
- časopisecké články MeSH
- Geografické názvy
- Afrika MeSH
- Asie MeSH
- Názvy látek
- půda MeSH
