Learning from Dynamic Traits: Seasonal Shifts Yield Insights into Ecophysiological Trade-Offs across Scales from Macroevolutionary to Intraindividual

Evolutionary trade‐offs in the chemical defense of floral and fruit tissues across genus Cornus

“…The number of focal individuals of each species ranged from one to four, depending on availability in the living collections of the Arnold Arboretum. Whole‐leaf samples from the same plants had been collected in May of the 2015 growing season as part of a separate study (Mason et al, 2020). The 281 acres of the Arnold Arboretum have very similar climate and soil conditions and can serve as an experimental common garden, minimizing the effect of environmental variation on species’ trait differences relative to field sampling across continents.…”

“…Tannins are another subclass of phenolic secondary metabolites that contribute to plant defense in several ways, including forming complexes with plant proteins to inhibit assimilation by herbivores, damaging digestive track linings through protein precipitation, and the creation of oxidative stress in herbivores (Bernays et al, 1989; Butler, 1989; Cipollini and Levey, 1997; Nomura and Itioka, 2002; Shimada, 2006; Roslin and Salminen, 2008; Spalinger et al, 2010; Moles et al, 2011; Salminen and Karonen, 2011). These same three traits were quantified in a parallel manner for leaves as reported by Mason et al (2020).…”

“…Species native habitat environmental data were obtained from Mason et al (2020), as deposited in the Dryad Digital Repository (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxwhr). In brief, that study used the following approach: occurrence data from the native distributions of each species was obtained as latitude–longitude coordinates from digitized herbarium records via the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, 2019) and Integrated Digitized Biocollections (iDigBio, 2019).…”

“…Species means for each trait were taken across all individuals sampled within a given taxa (Appendix S3), and environmental variables were averaged across occurrence points (Appendix S4). For phylogenetic comparative analyses, the most taxonomically thorough phylogeny available was used (Xiang et al, 2006), as reconstructed by Mason et al (2020) and deposited in the Dryad Digital Repository (https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.wh70rxwhr). In brief, the originally published matK and ITS sequences published by Xiang et al (2006) for the taxa of interest were concatenated, and a phylogeny reconstructed using maximum likelihood under a GTRCAT model in RAxML v. 8.2.10 (Stamatakis, 2014).…”

Trait plasticity and covariance along a continuous soil moisture gradient

“…E-mail: greymonroe@gmail.com ables have been studied is not unique to investigations of plant responses to soil moisture. Recent decades have seen increased appreciation for modeling traits as mathematical functions of continuous variables across diverse organisms (Pettay et al 2008;Rocha and Klaczko 2012;Mason et al 2020), a wide range of traits (Robinson et al 2009;McGuigan et al 2010;Stinchcombe et al 2010), and numerous components of the environment (Brommer et al 2008;McGuigan 2009;Pearse et al 2019). This burgeoning interest in the importance of "function-valued traits" has evolved from a call-to-arms to a field experiencing rapid theoretical and empirical advances (Kirkpatrick and Heckman 1989;Kingsolver et al 2001;Griswold et al 2008;Stinchcombe et al 2012;Goolsby 2015;Gomulkiewicz et al 2018).…”