Abstract
Understanding the response of plant traits to environmental change is critical. Specific leaf area (SLA) is an important plant functional trait, correlating with environmental conditions and indicating certain ecophysiological traits. Although the SLA-environment relationship has been extensively studied, SLA response at the regional scale is limited. In order to study how SLA changes with environment at the regional scale, SLA and abiotic data were collected from five forest types distributed across 746 sites. These data were collected from studies examining the effect on SLA to temperature, precipitation and altitudinal variation. The mean SLA was 149±18, 100±7, 151±17, 154±22 and 113±25 cm 2 g -1 in Boreal/temperate Larix forest (TLF), boreal/alpine Picea-Abies forest (APAF), temperate/subtropical montane Populus-Betula deciduous forest (MPBF), temperate deciduous broadleaf forest (TDBF) and subtropical evergreen broadleaf forest (SEBF), respectively. With increasing mean annual temperature (MAT), SLA increased significantly in TLF and SEBF, but decreased significantly in APAF and MPBF. As mean annual precipitation (MAP) increased, SLA significantly increased in TLF and significantly decreased in TDBF. A significant negative correlation occurred between SLA and altitude in APAF, TDBF and SEBF. These results indicated that SLA may predict tree response to environmental change in some forest types. KEYWORD: altitude; environmental change; precipitation; phenotypic plasticity; SLA; temperature. International Conference on Industrial Technology and Management Science (ITMS 2015) © 2015. The authors Published by Atlantis Press 1527 In China forests cover a large geographic area. The forest environments are characterized by steep temperature, precipitation and altitudinal gradients, providing ideal conditions to examine shifts in SLA across environmental gradients. To investigate a forest-level shift in plant SLA across different environments, we tested if the SLA in five different forest types shifted relative to changes in temperature, precipitation and altitude. 2 MATERIALS AND METHODS
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