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      Intraspecific Relationships among Wood Density, Leaf Structural Traits and Environment in Four Co-Occurring Species of Nothofagus in New Zealand

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          Abstract

          Plant functional traits capture important variation in plant strategy and function. Recent literature has revealed that within-species variation in traits is greater than previously supposed. However, we still have a poor understanding of how intraspecific variation is coordinated among different traits, and how it is driven by environment. We quantified intraspecific variation in wood density and five leaf traits underpinning the leaf economics spectrum (leaf dry matter content, leaf mass per unit area, size, thickness and density) within and among four widespread Nothofagus tree species in southern New Zealand. We tested whether intraspecific relationships between wood density and leaf traits followed widely reported interspecific relationships, and whether variation in these traits was coordinated through shared responses to environmental factors. Sample sites varied widely in environmental variables, including soil fertility (25–900 mg kg –1 total P), precipitation (668–4875 mm yr –1), temperature (5.2–12.4 °C mean annual temperature) and latitude (41–46 °S). Leaf traits were strongly correlated with one another within species, but not with wood density. There was some evidence for a positive relationship between wood density and leaf tissue density and dry matter content, but no evidence that leaf mass or leaf size were correlated with wood density; this highlights that leaf mass per unit area cannot be used as a surrogate for component leaf traits such as tissue density. Trait variation was predicted by environmental factors, but not consistently among different traits; e.g., only leaf thickness and leaf density responded to the same environmental cues as wood density. We conclude that although intraspecific variation in wood density and leaf traits is strongly driven by environmental factors, these responses are not strongly coordinated among functional traits even across co-occurring, closely-related plant species.

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          Most cited references23

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          Towards a worldwide wood economics spectrum.

          Wood performs several essential functions in plants, including mechanically supporting aboveground tissue, storing water and other resources, and transporting sap. Woody tissues are likely to face physiological, structural and defensive trade-offs. How a plant optimizes among these competing functions can have major ecological implications, which have been under-appreciated by ecologists compared to the focus they have given to leaf function. To draw together our current understanding of wood function, we identify and collate data on the major wood functional traits, including the largest wood density database to date (8412 taxa), mechanical strength measures and anatomical features, as well as clade-specific features such as secondary chemistry. We then show how wood traits are related to one another, highlighting functional trade-offs, and to ecological and demographic plant features (growth form, growth rate, latitude, ecological setting). We suggest that, similar to the manifold that tree species leaf traits cluster around the 'leaf economics spectrum', a similar 'wood economics spectrum' may be defined. We then discuss the biogeography, evolution and biogeochemistry of the spectrum, and conclude by pointing out the major gaps in our current knowledge of wood functional traits.
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            Continental-scale patterns of canopy tree composition and function across Amazonia.

            The world's greatest terrestrial stores of biodiversity and carbon are found in the forests of northern South America, where large-scale biogeographic patterns and processes have recently begun to be described. Seven of the nine countries with territory in the Amazon basin and the Guiana shield have carried out large-scale forest inventories, but such massive data sets have been little exploited by tropical plant ecologists. Although forest inventories often lack the species-level identifications favoured by tropical plant ecologists, their consistency of measurement and vast spatial coverage make them ideally suited for numerical analyses at large scales, and a valuable resource to describe the still poorly understood spatial variation of biomass, diversity, community composition and forest functioning across the South American tropics. Here we show, by using the seven forest inventories complemented with trait and inventory data collected elsewhere, two dominant gradients in tree composition and function across the Amazon, one paralleling a major gradient in soil fertility and the other paralleling a gradient in dry season length. The data set also indicates that the dominance of Fabaceae in the Guiana shield is not necessarily the result of root adaptations to poor soils (nodulation or ectomycorrhizal associations) but perhaps also the result of their remarkably high seed mass there as a potential adaptation to low rates of disturbance.
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              A trait-based approach to community assembly: partitioning of species trait values into within- and among-community components.

              Plant functional traits vary both along environmental gradients and among species occupying similar conditions, creating a challenge for the synthesis of functional and community ecology. We present a trait-based approach that provides an additive decomposition of species' trait values into alpha and beta components: beta values refer to a species' position along a gradient defined by community-level mean trait values; alpha values are the difference between a species' trait values and the mean of co-occurring taxa. In woody plant communities of coastal California, beta trait values for specific leaf area, leaf size, wood density and maximum height all covary strongly, reflecting species distributions across a gradient of soil moisture availability. Alpha values, on the other hand, are generally not significantly correlated, suggesting several independent axes of differentiation within communities. This trait-based framework provides a novel approach to integrate functional ecology and gradient analysis with community ecology and coexistence theory.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, USA )
                1932-6203
                2013
                18 March 2013
                : 8
                : 3
                : e58878
                Affiliations
                [1]Landcare Research, Lincoln, New Zealand
                Michigan State University, United States of America
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: SJR RBA RDS DAP. Performed the experiments: SJR RPB TAE JMH CWM. Analyzed the data: SJR DAP. Wrote the paper: SJR DAP.

                Article
                PONE-D-12-35621
                10.1371/journal.pone.0058878
                3601108
                23527041
                302ed50c-badf-4689-a4f0-f99538b12d8b
                Copyright @ 2013

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

                History
                : 13 November 2012
                : 7 February 2013
                Page count
                Pages: 13
                Funding
                Funding provided by Landcare Research Capability Funding; Core funding for Crown Research Institutes from the New Zealand Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment‘s Science and Innovation Group; and the National Vegetation Survey Databank. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology
                Ecology
                Plant Ecology
                Plant-Environment Interactions
                Genetics
                Heredity
                Phenotypes
                Plant Science
                Plant Ecology
                Plant-Environment Interactions
                Plants
                Leafs
                Trees
                Plant Physiology

                Uncategorized
                Uncategorized

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