Diversity in habit expands the environmental niche of Ziziphus (Rhamnaceae)

Abstract

Functional traits are a way to infer processes from pattern, and as such are used to disentangle the macroecology and biogeography of plant families (e.g., Onstein et al., 2019;Xue et al., 2020) and biomes (e.g., Gomes et al., 2020;Solofondranohatra et al., 2018), but only infrequently plant genera (although see Proches et al., 2012;Pezzini et al., 2021). As morpho-physio-phenological characters, functional traits relate to the life history strategies of plants that embody growth, reproduction, and survival (Violle et al., 2007) and indicate how species relate to the environment. Fruit traits have been used to interpret the fossil record and infer genus-level paleo-distribution