Abstract
Functional trait data enhance climate change research by linking climate change, biodiversity response, and ecosystem functioning, and by enabling comparison between systems sharing few taxa. Across four sites along a 3000–4130 m a.s.l. gradient spanning 5.3 °C in growing season temperature in Mt. Gongga, Sichuan, China, we collected plant functional trait and vegetation data from control plots, open top chambers (OTCs), and reciprocally transplanted vegetation turfs. Over five years, we recorded vascular plant composition in 140 experimental treatment and control plots. We collected trait data associated with plant resource use, growth, and life history strategies (leaf area, leaf thickness, specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, leaf C, N and P content and C and N isotopes) from local populations and from experimental treatments. The database consists of 6,671 plant records and 36,743 trait measurements (increasing the trait data coverage of the regional flora by 500%) covering 11 traits and 193 plant taxa (ca. 50% of which have no previous published trait data) across 37 families.
Highlights
Background & SummaryClimate warming has wide-ranging impacts on biodiversity and functioning of alpine ecosystems, affecting phenology[1,2], species ranges[3,4], local plant abundance and biodiversity[5,6], and ecosystem carbon, nutrient, and water fluxes[7]
Comparisons across sites or regions, either through formalized replicated experiments or meta-analyses and other types of syntheses, are critically important to understand what drives the variation in biodiversity and ecosystem response to climate change
In alpine regions, where temperature is a major limiting factor, traits associated with the leaf economics spectrum, a set of leaf traits that characterize individuals along a continuum from ‘fast’ to ‘slow’ photosynthetic and tissue turnover rates and life histories[18,19,20], should be relevant for responses to climatic warming
Summary
Climate warming has wide-ranging impacts on biodiversity and functioning of alpine ecosystems, affecting phenology[1,2], species ranges[3,4], local plant abundance and biodiversity[5,6], and ecosystem carbon, nutrient, and water fluxes[7]. Functional traits underlie variation among individuals in their ability to survive, reproduce, and function under different environmental conditions[13,14,15] Because traits vary both within and between species, and can be affected by environment, evolutionary history and plasticity[16,17], trait-based approaches offer great opportunity for improved understanding of the drivers, constraints and consequences of variability in biodiversity and ecosystem responses to climate change. 100 additional species, and increases the number of unique trait measurements from this regional flora by 500%, according to the Botanical Information and Ecology Network (BIEN; http://bien.nceas.ucsb.edu/ bien/) database[30] These traits campaigns were conducted as part of two Plant Functional Traits Courses (PFTC1 and PFTC2) for international students in trait-based theory and methods (see [31,32]). The data are comparable with data from later courses in Wayquecha, Peru (PFTC3 and 5) in 2018 and 2020 and Longyearbyen, Svalbard (PFTC4) in 2018 as well as with upcoming courses
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