The global spectrum of plant form and function: enhanced species-level trait dataset

Abstract

Here we provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form and function. The dataset is based on ca. 1 million trait records received via the TRY database (representing ca. 2,500 original publications) and additional unpublished data. It provides 92,159 species mean values for the six traits, covering 46,047 species. The data are complemented by higher-level taxonomic classification and six categorical traits (woodiness, growth form, succulence, adaptation to terrestrial or aquatic habitats, nutrition type and leaf type). Data quality management is based on a probabilistic approach combined with comprehensive validation against expert knowledge and external information. Intense data acquisition and thorough quality control produced the largest and, to our knowledge, most accurate compilation of empirically observed vascular plant species mean traits to date.

The end of the line: competitive exclusion and the extinction of historical entities

“…It is unlikely that, for many groups, the near-entirety of function for a biological clade can be captured by a single trait, as is possible for SLs. Previous work has demonstrated, however, that even for a very large clade, a very small number of traits can be representative of the variation in growth, survival and reproduction for that clade [ 78 ]. Multiple functional traits can be considered in isolation using our approach, or multivariate data can be reduced to a single value using analytical techniques that condense the number of dimensions in the data (principal component analysis, factor analysis, etc.)…”

Pollination and mating traits underlie diverse reproductive strategies in flowering plants

“…Then, using the approach of Mouillot et al (2021), we calculated statistics allowing comparison of our trait space to others. The AUC criterion, which indicates how well the first n axes summarize the total variation in the data set, indicated that to get a good representation of our trait space, we must keep more dimensions than for the data set derived from Díaz et al (2022) as shown in Fig. 4b.…”

Functional diversity metrics can perform well with highly incomplete data sets

“…We also analysed a near-complete crocodilian data set (Griffith et al, 2022) and partially complete plant data set (Díaz et al, 2022) to test the generalisability of our findings. Details of these data sets, their analyses and findings are described in Supplementary Information Section 2.…”

“…In contrast with many previous studies that use simulated data sets (Johnson et al, 2021;Kim et al, 2018), here we take advantage of the recently released near-complete bird trait data set, AVONET (Tobias, 2021), near-complete crocodile data set (Griffith et al, 2022) and also analysed a partial plant data set (Díaz et al, 2022). Using nonsimulated data sets offers a more realistic representation of empirical diversity analyses, where outliers and non-normal distributions are likely to be present (Junker et al, 2016).…”