Plant Functional Diversity and the Biogeography of Biomes in North and South America

Susy Echeverría-Londoño,Brody Sandel,Brian J Enquist,Brian S Maitner,Robert K Peet,Danilo M Neves,Cyrille Violle,Brian Mcgill,Andrew J Kerkhoff,Brad Boyle,Susan K Wiser,Jens-Christian Svenning,Nathan J B Kraft,Stephen A Smith

doi:10.3389/fevo.2018.00219

Abstract

The concept of the biome has a long history dating back to Carl Ludwig Willdenow and Alexander von Humboldt. However, while the association between climate and the structure and diversity of vegetation has a long history, scientists have only recently begun to develop a more synthetic understanding of biomes based on the evolution of plant diversity, function, and community assembly. At the broadest scales, climate filters species based on their functional attributes, and the resulting functional differences in dominant vegetation among biomes are important to modeling the global carbon cycle and the functioning of the Earth system. Nevertheless, across biomes, plant species have been shown to occupy a common set of global functional “spectra”, reflecting variation in overall plant size, leaf economics, and hydraulics. Still, comprehensive measures of functional diversity and assessments of functional similarity have not been compared across biomes at continental to global scales. Here, we examine distributions of functional diversity of plant species across the biomes of North and South America, based on distributional information for > 80,000 vascular plant species and functional trait data for ca. 8,000 of those species. First, we show that despite progress in data integration and synthesis, significant knowledge shortfalls persist that limit our ability to quantify the functional biodiversity of biomes. Second, our analyses of the available data show that all the biomes in North and South America share a common pattern–most geographically common, widespread species in any biome tend to be functionally similar whereas the most functionally distinctive species are restricted in their distribution. Third, when only the widespread and functionally similar species in each biome are considered, biomes can be more readily distinguished functionally, and patterns of dissimilarity between biomes appear to reflect a correspondence between climate and functional niche space. Taken together, our results suggest that while the study of the functional diversity of biomes is still in its formative stages, further development of the field will yield insights linking evolution, biogeography, community assembly, and ecosystem function.

Highlights

Ecologists and biogeographers organize land plant biodiversity into climatically-determined biomes, with physiognomies characterized by the growth forms and functional traits of the dominant species (Moncrieff et al, 2016)
With fewer than 10% of the mapped species represented, the trait data were quite sparse for our biome-scale species assemblages (Figure 2A)
SLA, height, and seed mass are undersampled in the tropics and temperate South America, while leaf N and wood density are more evenly sampled among regions

Summary

Introduction

Ecologists and biogeographers organize land plant biodiversity into climatically-determined biomes, with physiognomies characterized by the growth forms and functional traits of the dominant species (Moncrieff et al, 2016). The biome concept has a long history dating back to Carl Ludwig Willdenow and Alexander von Humboldt. Willdenow recognized that similar climates support similar vegetation forms, and Humboldt observed the widespread association between plant distribution, physiognomy, and environmental factors. The biome concept reflects the assumption that similar environmental pressures select for species with similar functional attributes, independent of their evolutionary history. Earth’s extant biomes are to some extent phylogenetically distinct, with many/most of the characteristic species being drawn from specific lineages exhibiting key adaptations not just to climatic selection but to additional pressures like fire or megaherbivores (Woodward et al, 2004; Pennington et al, 2006; Donoghue and Edwards, 2014). Because biomes represent broad-scale regularities in Earth’s vegetation, understanding functional differences among biomes is critically important to modeling the global carbon cycle and the functioning of the Earth system, including responses to anthropogenic global change (Bonan et al, 2012; van Bodegom et al, 2014; Xia et al, 2015)

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Conclusion