Modern clubmosses are a vestige of their gargantuan carboniferous ancestors that dominated the paleoflora flora for millions of years. Yet little is known of the ecophysiology of these plants. The goal of this paper was to examine four temperate lycophyte taxa that are commonly found in northeast US temperate forests. We evaluated the relationship of several functional parameters and found evidence of functional ecological convergence largely based on growth form. Species with substantial belowground biomass investment are consistently more similar across multiple traits than taxa with rhizomes that are largely aboveground. Such differences may help explain how these taxa partition their environment and frequently grow in dense multispecies stands.
Paleoclimate proxy records aggregated for specific intervals in Earth's geologically recent past offer valuable insight into spatiotemporal patterns of hydroclimate change (PAGES Hydro2k Consortium, 2017;Tierney et al., 2020). Comparing compilations of moisture-sensitive proxies with paleoclimate model simulations can elucidate the driving mechanisms of past changes in precipitation and effective moisture (e.g.,
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