Functional distinctiveness of major plant lineages

Abstract

Summary1. Plant traits vary widely across species and underpin differences in ecological strategy. Despite centuries of interest, the contributions of different evolutionary lineages to modern-day functional diversity remain poorly quantified. 2. Expanding data bases of plant traits plus rapidly improving phylogenies enable for the first time a data-driven global picture of plant functional diversity across the major clades of higher plants. We mapped five key traits relevant to metabolism, resource competition and reproductive strategy onto a phylogeny across 48324 vascular plant species world-wide, along with climate and biogeographic data. Using a novel metric, we test whether major plant lineages are functionally distinctive. We then highlight the trait-lineage combinations that are most functionally distinctive within the present-day spread of ecological strategies. 3. For some trait-clade combinations, knowing the clade of a species conveys little information to neo-and palaeo-ecologists. In other trait-clade combinations, the clade identity can be highly revealing, especially informative clade-trait combinations include Proteaceae, which is highly distinctive, representing the global slow extreme of the leaf economic spectrum. Magnoliidae and Rosidae contribute large leaf sizes and seed masses and have distinctively warm, wet climatic distributions.

Monitoring plant functional diversity from space

“…1), select trait data has now been collected in situ for more than 100,000 vascular plant species, providing a means to both directly and indirectly connect, through models, spectral observations from the top layer of vegetation to a variety of plant traits. And the global phylogeny (tree of life) for plants is becoming ever more complete 44 , enabling researchers to trace the evolutionary history of plant traits within lineages 45 . While for some traits and functions convergent evolution has pulled disparate, and often geographically distant, lineages into functional similarity [46][47][48][49] , traits and associated functions are in many cases conserved to relatively deep phylogenetic levels [50][51][52] .…”

Functional Rarity: The Ecology of Outliers

“…Although no work has been done so far following our suggested framework, there is a long tradition in evolutionary biology to investigate how ecological specialisation evolve (e.g., refs. [71,72]). Pioneering work by Futuyma & Moreno [73] has focused on specialization for resource in terms of diet and feeding behaviour.…”

Perturbation Experiments in Community Plant Species during Recovery from Agricultural Abandonment in a Semi-Arid Region of Central-Western Spain

“…Starting from the second season, the number of colonizers began to differentiate according to the treatments, being on the lowest average in the HD and highest in the NC plots. The development of the community is often affected by the presence of strong dominants, and it depends on the local conditions and on the presence of species that are able to attain high dominance under given condition [23].…”

“…However, the most successful LD mixture was usually equally successful as the HD mixtures. This suggests that diversity was important primarily for its "insurance effect" [23] [53]. Whilst some of the LD mixtures failed to establish successfully, the HD mixtures were always able to compensate the failure of some species to establish.…”

“…A number of rather short-term experiments carried out by van der Putten et al [8]; Lepš et al [19]; Hedlund et al [20] have indicated that, on average, species-rich mixtures are more productive and also more efficient in suppressing weed species and preventing further colonization than species-poor mixtures [8] [21] [22] [23], with some low diversity mixtures being as productive and as efficient as the high diversity mixtures; those successful low diversity mixtures are usually composed of species domi-nating the high diversity mixtures [18] [24] [25]. Several experiments studying the effects of sowing species mixtures on vegetation development had been conducted for a limited period of time, and some were accompanied by weeding [26].…”