Functional traits of woody plants: correspondence of species rankings between field adults and laboratory‐grown seedlings?

Abstract

Abstract.Research into interspecific variation in functional traits is important for our understanding of trade-offs in plant design and function, for plant functional type classifications and for understanding ecosystem responses to shifts in species composition. Interspecific rankings of functional traits are a function of, among other factors, ontogenetic or allometric development and environmental effects on phenotypes. For woody plants, which attain large size and long lives, these factors might have strong effects on interspecific trait rankings. This paper is the first to test and compare the correspondence of interspecific rankings between laboratory grown seedlings and field grown adult plants for a wide range of functional leaf and stem traits. It employs data for 90 diverse woody and semiwoody species in a temperate British and a (sub)Mediterranean Spanish flora, all collected according to a strict protocol. For 12 out of 14 leaf and stem traits we found significant correlations between the species ranking in laboratory seedlings and field adults. For leaf size and maximum stem vessel diameter > 50 % of variation in field adults was explained by that in laboratory seedlings. Two important determinants of plant and ecosystem functioning, specific leaf area and leaf N content, had only 27 to 36 and 17 to 31 % of variation, respectively, in field adults explained by laboratory seedlings, owing to subsets of species with particular ecologies deviating from the general trend. In contrast, interspecific rankings for the same traits were strongly correlated between populations of field adults on different geological substrata. Extrapolation of interspecific trait rankings from laboratory seedlings to adult plants in the field, or vice versa, should be done with great caution. Keywords: Allometry; Interspecific variation; Intraspecific variation; Ontogeny; Shrub; Trait; Tree.Nomenclature: Castroviejo et al. (1986Castroviejo et al. ( -2000; Stace (1991).Abbreviations: DM/SM = Leaf dry mass/saturated mass ratio; LD = leaf density; PAR = Photosynthetically active radiation; SLA = Specific leaf area; SSLM = Specific saturated leaf mass; SVD max = Maximum stem vessel diameter.

Phylogenetic and functional characteristics of household yard floras and their changes along an urbanization gradient

“…Phylogenetic distinctness Cornelissen (1996), Cornelissen et al (2003Cornelissen et al ( , 2004 Shipley (1995Shipley ( , 2002, Cornelissen (1996), Cornelissen et al (1996Cornelissen et al ( , 1997Cornelissen et al ( , 2003Cornelissen et al ( , 2004, Atkin et al (1997), McKenna and Shipley (1999), Meziane and Shipley (1999a reflects how many lineages across a phylogenetic tree appear in a species assemblage and enables us to compare different communities with respect to phylogenetic diversity: If the phylogenetic distinctness of community A is significantly larger than the phylogenetic distinctness of community B, the species in A are less closely related and encompass more diverse lineages than the species in B. In other words, if species are concentrated on few branches (closely related species), they will have lower AvPD than if they are distributed over many branches (distantly related species).…”

Root traits explain different foraging strategies between resprouting life histories

“…The harvesting time was based on a standardised developmental stage (cf. Cornelissen et al 2003); specifically, seedlings were sampled 1 week after the total expansion of the first pair of true leaves. Nevertheless, the age at sampling did not differ between resprouting abilities (mean±SD: 42±10 days for resprouters and 43±8 days for non-resprouters; P = 0.560).…”

Does ontogeny modulate irradiance-elicited plasticity of leaf traits in saplings of rain-forest tree species? A test with Dicorynia guianensis and Tachigali melinonii (Fabaceae, Caesalpinioideae)

“…The majority of studies addressing ontogenetic shifts of leaf traits used plant size (height, diameter or biomass) as a covariant (Poorter, 1999;Sterck and Bongers, 1998) or focused on a comparison between very young seedlings or saplings and mature trees and did not take into account any intermediate stage (Cavender-Bares and Bazzaz, 2000;Cornelissen et al, 2003;Holscher, 2004;Mediavilla and Escudero, 2003;Thomas and Winner, 2002). A meta-analysis of field measurements in saplings vs. mature trees (Thomas and Winner, 2002) showed that A sat a was larger in adult trees than in saplings, especially for temperate deciduous trees.…”