Climate, Life Form and Family Jointly Control Variation of Leaf Traits.

Hao Zhang,Zhigang Zou,Fuping Zeng,Zhaoxia Zeng

doi:10.3390/plants8080286

Abstract

Variation in leaf traits may represent differences in physiological processes and environmental adaptative strategies. Using multivariate analyses, we investigated 13 leaf traits to quantify the trade-off in these traits and the trait–climate/biome relationships based on the China Plant Trait Database, which contains morphometric and physiological character information on 1215 species for 122 sites, ranging from the north to the tropics, and from deserts and grasslands to woodlands and forests. Leaf traits across the dataset of Chinese plants showed different spatial patterns along longitudinal and latitudinal gradients and high variation. There were significant positive or negative correlations among traits; however, with the exception of the leaf 13C:12C stable isotope ratio, there were no significant correlations between leaf area and other traits. Climate, life form, and family jointly accounted for 68.4% to 95.7% of trait variance. Amongst these forms of variation partitioning, the most important partitioning feature was the family independence of climate and life form (35.6% to 57.2%), while the joint effect of family and climate was 4.5% to 26.2%, and the joint effect of family and life form was 2.4% to 21.6%. The findings of this study will enhance our understanding of the variation in leaf traits in Chinese flora and the environmental adaptative strategies of plants against a background of global climate change, and also may enrich and improve the leaf economics spectrum of China.

Highlights

Functional traits, as physiological and ecological indicators related to the acquisition, utilization, and maintenance of resources by plants, reflect the response of plants to different environments and the trade-off of physiological or evolutionary adaptation among different functions within plants [1,2,3]
We found that 13 leaf traits of plants growing in China showed different patterns of variation (Table S1), which may be influenced by the natural and historical conditions and the evolution of vegetation [18]
At species and sites levels, predictions of leaf traits except for LDMC and SLA based on the multivariate analysis were similar with the world−wide prediction of traits [21]

Summary

Introduction

Functional traits, as physiological and ecological indicators related to the acquisition, utilization, and maintenance of resources by plants, reflect the response of plants to different environments and the trade-off of physiological or evolutionary adaptation among different functions within plants [1,2,3]. The most common functional traits of plants are morphological, physiological, vegetative and reproductive, aboveground and belowground, and effect and response traits [4,5]. In most studies, these traits have been widely divided into soft and hard traits. Compared with soft traits (e.g., propagator size, shape, leaf area, tree height, etc.), hard traits (e.g., leaf photosynthetic rate, plant cold tolerance, negative tolerance, etc.) are difficult to measure but can accurately represent the response of plants to external environment change [8]. Studies on functional traits have been performed at multiple levels, ranging from

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion