AOBPreview originally published online on April 4, 2006
Annals of Botany 2007 99(5):1003-1015; doi:10.1093/aob/mcl066
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Relationships Among Ecologically Important Dimensions of Plant Trait Variation in Seven Neotropical Forests
1 Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, New South Wales 2109, Australia
2 Department of Integrative Biology, 3060 Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140, USA
3 Forest Ecology and Forest Management, Centre for Ecosystem Studies, Wageningen University, PO Box 47, 6700 AA Wageningen, The Netherlands
4 Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-1715, USA
5 Centro de Investigaciones en Ecosistemas, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Campus Morelia. Antigua Carretera a Patzcuaro 8701, Ex-Hacienda de San Jose de la Huerta, 58190, Morelia, Michoacan, Mexico
6 Department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology, University of California, Santa Barbara, CA 931067, USA
7 Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, 100 Ecology Building, 1987 Upper Buford Circle, St Paul, MN 55108, USA
8 Department of Botany, Box 90339, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708-0339, USA
9 Instituto Boliviano de Investigación Forestal, Casilla 6204, Santa Cruz, Bolivia
10 Department of Biology, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC, USA
11 Field Museum of Natural History, 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive, Chicago IL 60605, USA
12 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Yale University, 165 Prospect St., P. O. Box 208106, New Haven, CT 06520-8106, USA
13 Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Apartado 2072, Balboa, Ancon, Republic of Panama
* For correspondence. E-mail iwright{at}rna.bio.mq.edu.au
Received: 10 October 2005 Returned for revision: 14 November 2005 Accepted: 5 January 2006 Published electronically: 4 April 2006
Background and Aims: When ecologically important plant traits are correlated they may be said to constitute an ecological ‘strategy’ dimension. Through identifying these dimensions and understanding their inter-relationships we gain insight into why particular trait combinations are favoured over others and into the implications of trait differences among species. Here we investigated relationships among several traits, and thus the strategy dimensions they represented, across 2134 woody species from seven Neotropical forests.
Methods: Six traits were studied: specific leaf area (SLA), the average size of leaves, seed and fruit, typical maximum plant height, and wood density (WD). Trait relationships were quantified across species at each individual forest as well as across the dataset as a whole. ‘Phylogenetic’ analyses were used to test for correlations among evolutionary trait-divergences and to ascertain whether interspecific relationships were biased by strong taxonomic patterning in the traits.
Key Results: The interspecific and phylogenetic analyses yielded congruent results. Seed and fruit size were expected, and confirmed, to be tightly related. As expected, plant height was correlated with each of seed and fruit size, albeit weakly. Weak support was found for an expected positive relationship between leaf and fruit size. The prediction that SLA and WD would be negatively correlated was not supported. Otherwise the traits were predicted to be largely unrelated, being representatives of putatively independent strategy dimensions. This was indeed the case, although WD was consistently, negatively related to leaf size.
Conclusions: The dimensions represented by SLA, seed/fruit size and leaf size were essentially independent and thus conveyed largely independent information about plant strategies. To a lesser extent the same was true for plant height and WD. Our tentative explanation for negative WD–leaf size relationships, now also known from other habitats, is that the traits are indirectly linked via plant hydraulics.
Key words: Fruit size, leaf size, phylogenetically independent contrasts, plant height, plant strategies, seed size, specific leaf area, tropical rainforest ecology, wood density
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