The Influence of Taxonomy and Environment on Leaf Trait Variation Along Tropical Abiotic Gradients
Imma Oliveras Menor, Lisa Patrick Bentley, Nikolaos M. Fyllas, Agne Gvozdevaite, Alexander Shenkin, Theresa Peprah, Paulo S. Morandi, Karine Silva Peixoto, Mickey Boakye, Stephen Adu‐Bredu, Beatriz Schwantes Marimon, Ben Hur Marimon, Norma Salinas, Roberta E. Martin, Gregory P. Asner, Sandra Dı́az, Brian J. Enquist, Yadvinder Malhi
Abstract
Deconstructing functional trait variation and co-variation across a wide range of environmental conditions should increase the mechanistic understanding of community assembly processes and improve current parameterization of dynamic vegetation models. Here, we present a study that deconstructs leaf trait variation and co-variation to iithin-species, taxonomic-interspecific, and plot-environment components comparing three tropical environmental gradients in Peru, Brazil and Ghana. We measured photosynthetic, chemical and structural leaf traits using a standardized sampling protocol, totalling more than 1,000 individuals belonging to 367 species sampled. Variation associated with the whole interspecific taxonomic component (species+genus+family) for most traits was relatively consistent across environmental gradients, but intra-specificwithin-species variation and the plot-environment variation was strongly dependent on the environmental gradient. Trait-trait co-variation was also strongly linked to the environmental gradient where the traits were measured, although some traits had consistent co-variation components irrespective of environmental gradient. Our results demonstrate that filtering along gradients is mostly expressed through trait intra- and interspecifictaxonomic variation, but that trait co-variation is strongly dependent on the local environment, and thus global trait co-variation relationships might not always apply at smaller scales.