Quantifying the extent of plant functional specialization using Grime's CSR strategies

Specialization refers to a species adaptation to a restricted range of environmental conditions. While generalist species are able to exploit a wide variety of resources in a broad range of habitats, specialist species tend to have narrower niche breadths. From an evolutionary perspective, specialization is the result of a functional syndrome in which a suite of traits covary to allow the effective exploitation of specific resources. Accordingly, the measurement of specialization should be based on a multi-trait approach. In plant ecology, a well-known classification of the adaptive strategies of plants is Grime's competitor, stress tolerator, ruderal (CSR) theory in which the three principal strategies represent relatively easily measurable trait combinations from the global spectrum of plant form and function arising under conditions of competition, abiotic restriction to growth or periodic disturbance, respectively. In this paper, we thus introduce a method to summarize the functional specialization of plant species and communities by applying inequality measures to Grime's CSR strategies. The general idea is that a plant species that can be exclusively assigned to one CSR strategy can be considered a specialist (as it adopts only one adaptive strategy to access resources), while species that share functional characteristics of multiple CSR strategies can be considered more generalist. The behavior of the proposed measures is shown with one case study on the functional changes of six Alpine vegetation types ordered along a gradient, from pioneer to more stable communities

Estimating and comparing food availability for tree-seed predators in typical pulsed-resource systems: alpine conifer forests.

Alpine conifers produce pulsed resources for the community of tree-seed consumers. Here, we describe field and statistical methods to estimate spatio-temporal variation in seed-crops in forests with different species composition. Annual and between-site variation in seed production was high and characterised by occurrence of mast-crops followed by seed-crop failure the following year. Seed-crops of different species did not fluctuate in parallel. Please see also: Plant Biosystem 143(3), Page 643 for Corrigendu

The functional trait spectrum of European temperate grasslands

Questions: What is the functional trait variation of European temperate grasslands and how does this reflect global patterns of plant form and function? Do habitat specialists show trait differentiation across habitat types?. Location: Europe. Methods: We compiled 18 regeneration and non-regeneration traits for a continental species pool consisting of 645 species frequent in five grassland types. These grassland types are widely distributed in Europe but differentiated by altitude, soil bedrock and traditional long-term management and disturbance regimes. We evaluated the multivariate trait space of this entire species pool and compared multi-trait variation and mean trait values of habitat specialists grouped by grassland type. Results: The first dimension of the trait space accounted for 23% of variation and reflected a gradient between fast-growing and slow-growing plants. Plant height and SLA contributed to both the first and second ordination axes. Regeneration traits mainly contributed to the second and following dimensions to explain 56% of variation across the first five axes. Habitat specialists showed functional differences between grassland types mainly through non-regeneration traits. Conclusions: The trait spectrum of plants dominating European temperate grasslands is primarily explained by growth strategies which are analogous to the trait variation observed at the global scale, and secondly by regeneration strategies. Functional differentiation of habitat specialists across grassland types is mainly related to environmental filtering linked with altitude and disturbance. This filtering pattern is mainly observed in non-regeneration traits, while most regeneration traits demonstrate multiple strategies within the same habitat type.EL, BJA, MTI, AM, PI and CB acknowledge the research leading to these results has received funding from the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013 under REA grant agreement no. 607785, as a part of the NAtive Seed Science TEchnology and Conservation (NASSTEC) Initial Training Network (ITN). BJA was further funded by the Marie Curie Clarín‐COFUND program of the Principality of Asturias and the European Union (ACB17‐26). BJA and HB acknowledge support from the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle–Jena–Leipzig funded by the German Research Foundation (DFTG FZT 118) through the sPlot research platform. PI acknowledges support from the Rural & Environment Science & Analytical Services Division of the Scottish Government. KÖ thanks RO1567‐IBB03/2018 for financial support

TRY plant trait database - enhanced coverage and open access

Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait-based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits-almost complete coverage for 'plant growth form'. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait-environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives

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-

Plant traits poorly predict winner and loser shrub species in a warming tundra biome

Climate change is leading to species redistributions. In the tundra biome, shrubs are generally expanding, but not all tundra shrub species will benefit from warming. Winner and loser species, and the characteristics that may determine success or failure, have not yet been fully identified. Here, we investigate whether past abundance changes, current range sizes and projected range shifts derived from species distribution models are related to plant trait values and intraspecific trait variation. We combined 17,921 trait records with observed past and modelled future distributions from 62 tundra shrub species across three continents. We found that species with greater variation in seed mass and specific leaf area had larger projected range shifts, and projected winner species had greater seed mass values. However, trait values and variation were not consistently related to current and projected ranges, nor to past abundance change. Overall, our findings indicate that abundance change and range shifts will not lead to directional modifications in shrub trait composition, since winner and loser species share relatively similar trait spaces

Climatic and soil factors explain the two-dimensional spectrum of global plant trait variation

Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land–climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variation at the organ and plant level and (2) leaf economics balancing leaf persistence against plant growth potential. The orthogonality of these two axes suggests they are differently influenced by environmental drivers. We find that these axes persist in a global dataset of 17 traits across more than 20,000 species. We find a dominant joint effect of climate and soil on trait variation. Additional independent climate effects are also observed across most traits, whereas independent soil effects are almost exclusively observed for economics traits. Variation in size traits correlates well with a latitudinal gradient related to water or energy limitation. In contrast, variation in economics traits is better explained by interactions of climate with soil fertility. These findings have the potential to improve our understanding of biodiversity patterns and our predictions of climate change impacts on biogeochemical cycles