Climatic and evolutionary contexts are required to infer plant life history strategies from functional traits at a global scale

Abstract

Life history strategies are fundamental to the ecology and evolution of organisms and are important for understanding extinction risk and responses to global change. Using global datasets and a multiple response modelling framework we show that trait‐climate interactions are associated with life history strategies for a diverse range of plant species at the global scale. Our modelling framework informs our understanding of trade‐offs and positive correlations between elements of life history after accounting for environmental context and evolutionary and trait‐based constraints. Interactions between plant traits and climatic context were needed to explain variation in age at maturity, distribution of mortality across the lifespan and generation times of species. Mean age at maturity and the distribution of mortality across plants’ lifespan were under evolutionary constraints. These findings provide empirical support for the theoretical expectation that climatic context is key to understanding trait to life history relationships globally.

The macroecology of plant populations from local to global scales

“…Generalisations arising from subsets of demographically well studied species (e.g. Cserg} o et al, 2017;Kelly et al, 2021) will help to inform and constrain potential responses of species for which only partial data are available.…”

“…Models of life history strategy and population performance using species or population trait values in a particular environmental context could improve our ability to predict ecological processes in current and future environments from widely available trait, phylogenetic and environmental data. Kelly et al (2021) used a comparative demographic approach across 80 species with demographic and trait data (including trees, shrubs and herbaceous perennials) to show that the life history metrics reproductive maturity and that generation time could be explained by traits in interaction with environmental variables in a phylogenetic context. For example, lifespan was positively correlated with plant size and structure (i.e.…”

“…Additionally, population macroecology makes use of widely available data on species traits (Kattge et al, 2011;D ıaz et al, 2016;Enquist et al, 2016;Maitner et al, 2018) and occurrences (GBIF, 2021), together with environmental data to test the direction and strength of associations with measures of demography, population performance and life history (e.g. Kelly et al, 2021).…”

Shifts in ecological strategy spectra of typical forest vegetation types across four climatic zones

“…changes in climate, land use and natural disturbance regimes) 9 – 11 . Therefore, comparing the functional compositions of vegetation types across different climatic zones, is an effective way in further understanding interactions between ecological strategies of species assemblages and environmental conditions 12 , 13 .…”

Intraspecific Variation on Palm Leaf Traits of Co-occurring Species—Does Local Hydrology Play a Role?

“…It has been frequently assumed that within-species variation is smaller than among species. This is exemplified by the large number of studies based on species means (e.g., Liu et al, 2021;Kelly et al, 2021) regardless of both theoretical background (Bolnick et al, 2011;Violle et al, 2012) and empirical evidence for intraspecific variation (e.g., Albert et al, 2011;Marenco et al, 2017;Osnas et al, 2018;Dong et al, 2020), pointing out that we still know little at which scales, life-forms, taxa and across which environmental gradients intraspecific variation is relevant to ecological processes. Moreover, there is a virtual lack of information on these patterns of intra to interspecific trait variation in palms, which have been suggested to be particularly susceptible to droughts (Eiserhardt et al, 2011;Esquivel-Muelbert et al, 2019; but see Emilio et al, 2019).…”