Climatic and evolutionary contexts are required to infer plant life history strategies from functional traits at a global scale

Publication history: Accepted - 15 January 2021; Published online - 27 February 2021.Life history strategies are fundamental to the ecology and evolution of organisms and are 2 important for understanding extinction risk and responses to global change. Using global 3 datasets and a multiple response modelling framework we show that trait-climate interactions 4 are associated with life history strategies for a diverse range of plant species at the global scale. 5 Our modelling framework informs our understanding of trade-offs and positive correlations 6 between elements of life history after accounting for environmental context and evolutionary 7 and trait-based constraints. Interactions between plant traits and climatic context were needed 8 to explain variation in age at maturity, distribution of mortality across the lifespan, generation 9 time of species. Mean age at maturity and the distribution of mortality across plants’ lifespan 10 were under evolutionary constraints. These findings provide empirical support for the 11 theoretical expectation that climatic context is key to understanding trait to life history 12 relationships globally.Irish Research Council - RK was supported by the Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellowship scheme, Project ID GOIPD/2016/324. The Irish Research Council Laureate Awards 2017/2018 funded YMB IRCLA/2017/60, and ALJ IRCLA/2017/186. European 604 Research Council Synergy grant no. ERC-2013-SyG 610028-IMBALANCE-