Can Functional Traits Explain Plant Coexistence? A Case Study with Tropical Lianas and Trees

Abstract

Organisms are adapted to their environment through a suite of anatomical, morphological, and physiological traits. These functional traits are commonly thought to determine an organism’s tolerance to environmental conditions. However, the differences in functional traits among co-occurring species, and whether trait differences mediate competition and coexistence is still poorly understood. Here we review studies comparing functional traits in two co-occurring tropical woody plant guilds, lianas and trees, to understand whether competing plant guilds differ in functional traits and how these differences may help to explain tropical woody plant coexistence. We examined 36 separate studies that compared a total of 140 different functional traits of co-occurring lianas and trees. We conducted a meta-analysis for ten of these functional traits, those that were present in at least five studies. We found that the mean trait value between lianas and trees differed significantly in four of the ten functional traits. Lianas differed from trees mainly in functional traits related to a faster resource acquisition life history strategy. However, the lack of difference in the remaining six functional traits indicates that lianas are not restricted to the fast end of the plant life–history continuum. Differences in functional traits between lianas and trees suggest these plant guilds may coexist in tropical forests by specializing in different life–history strategies, but there is still a significant overlap in the life–history strategies between these two competing guilds.

Lianas and trees exhibit divergent intrinsic water‐use efficiency along elevational gradients in South American and African tropical forests

“…Lianas are believed to have a higher g s on average than trees (see Wyka et al, 2013). However, lower g s in lianas than trees (Johnson et al, 2013) or no significant difference in g s between these two growth forms (see Mello et al, 2020) have also been reported. In a recent study, van der Sande et al ( 2019) found that g s was negatively correlated with iWUE for trees, but they found no correlation between g s and iWUE, and a weak positive correlation between…”

Comparative transcriptomics of tropical woody plants supports fast and furious strategy along the leaf economics spectrum in lianas

“…At early developmental stages, transcriptomic differences between lianas and non-lianas are most likely minimal. However, despite the ontogenetic and tissue diversity limitations there exists a suite of differences consistent with expectations from liana biology and functional traits theorized in LES [23–25, 58, 59]. Top leaf level functional traits of lianas correspond to higher SLA and maximal photosynthetic rates.…”

“…For this reason, we included three herbaceous climbers in the dataset with the assumption that leaves of woody and herbaceous climbers would experience similar constraints independent from their stem morphology and would perform in parallel (Table 1). Despite the ontogenetic and tissue diversity limitations, there exists a suite of differences consistent with expectations from the biology of climbing plants and functional traits theorized in LES [23, 24, 26, 63, 64]. Top leaf level functional traits of lianas correspond to higher SLA and maximal photosynthetic rates.…”

“…The foliar chemistry of lianas and trees also form a contrast based on leaf mass and area [25]. However, their leaves can also exhibit higher photosynthetic efficiencies despite the fact that the general leaf qualities reflect inexpensive, disposable, short longevity structures with little or no investment on defense [26].…”

How do soil resources affect herbivory in tropical plants along environmental gradients? A test using contrasting congeneric species

“…Plants adapt to habitat characteristics by morphological and physiological adjustments to speci c abiotic conditions (Harper 1977;Mark et al 2001;Mello et al 2020). Soil nutrients are amongst the most in uential drivers of species distribution (Prentice et al 1992; Rodrigues et al 2018) and morphological trait selection (Cunningham et al 1999;Ordoñez et al 2009).…”