Plant Traits

1. Functional traits offer promising avenues to investigate how community composition and diversity define ecosystem functioning and service delivery. In recent years, many empirical studies on the importance of functional traits for ecosystem service provisioning have been undertaken, but a general understanding and synthesis of results is lacking for many ecosystems.
2. Here, we focus on temperate grasslands and present a systematic literature review synthesizing how plant functional traits are interrelated with ecosystem services.
3. Based on 109 studies, we identified a core set of 40 functional traits and eleven ecosystem services. Several of these traits were only linked to one, while 75% of traits were linked to two or more ecosystem services.
4. We found that trait-specific constraints can lead to both synergies and trade-offs in the supply of multiple ecosystem services. For instance, synergies between biomass production and climate regulation can be achieved by changing morphometric root traits such as increasing root diameter, tissue density or shoot to root ratio. On the other hand, supporting fast-growing exploitative species characterized by high specific leaf area and nitrogen content typically leads to trade-offs between fodder quality and water purification.
5. Synthesis and applications. By applying network analysis, we found five groups of ecosystem services sharing common functional traits. Within and among these groups, we identified trade-offs among traits as well as among services and found options for synergies. These can be particularly useful in landscape planning, and when management aims focus on maintaining multifunctionality of ecosystems and maximizing corresponding ecosystem service delivery.

Abstract  Sprouting vigour is determined by the plant amount of reserves and intrinsic growth rate of plants. While the first factor has been well studied, the second is far less understood. Although a higher growth rate would imply a higher sprouting vigour, fast-growing species may have less below-ground reserves, and thus, a lower sprouting potential. The relative importance of both opposite effects was little explored in the literature. To analyse the influence of growth rate on sprouting vigour, one growth season after a fire we measured plant height of the old (pre-fire) and new (post-fire) tissue in 194 individuals of 14 woody species from a woodland in central Argentina. We calculated a mean value of pre- and post-fire height for each species, and obtained from a data-base potential height at maturity, wood density (WD) and specific leaf area (SLA), as surrogates of intrinsic growth rate. We performed a forward stepwise multiple regression using WD and SLA, together with mean pre-fire height or potential height as independent variables, and mean post-fire height (as an indicator of resprout vigour) as the dependent variable. Interactions were also tested. Pre-fire height, WD and their interaction term were the variables that best explained post-fire height. We also analysed the relationship between pre- and post-fire size for each species independently by fitting hyperbolic functions. Then we correlated both parameters of the functions to species characteristics (WD, SLA, potential height and mean pre-fire height). Both parameters of the hyperbolic functions were significantly correlated only with WD, but not with the other species characteristics. All results together indicate that species with low WD (i.e. high potential growth rate) regrow more vigorously than species with high WD when pre-fire individuals were tall. In contrast, when pre-fire individuals were small, WD had no influence on sprout vigour. A trade-off between allocation of biomass to underground reserves and shoot growth seems to be responsible for the patterns obtained. For small individuals, below-ground reserves seem to play a more important role than inherent growth rate (here measured through WD) in determining the sprouting vigour, while for large individuals, growth rate seems more important than reserves.

Our ability to understand and predict the response of ecosystems to a changing environment depends on quantifying vegetation functional diversity. However, representing this diversity at the global scale is challenging. Typically, in Earth system models, characterization of plant diversity has been limited to grouping related species into plant functional types (PFTs), with all trait variation in a PFT collapsed into a single mean value that is applied globally. Using the largest global plant trait database and state of the art Bayesian modeling, we created fine-grained global maps of plant trait distributions that can be applied to Earth system models. Focusing on a set of plant traits closely coupled to photosynthesis and foliar respiration-specific leaf area (SLA) and dry mass-based concentrations of leaf nitrogen ([Formula: see text]) and phosphorus ([Formula: see text]), we characterize how traits vary within and among over 50,000 [Formula: see text]-km cells across the entire ...