Climate-trait relationships exhibit strong habitat specificity in plant communities across Europe

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Authors

KAMBACH Stephan SABATINI Francesco Maria ATTORRE Fabio BIURRUN Idoia BOENISCH Gerhard BONARI Gianmaria ČARNI Andraž CARRANZA Maria Laura CHIARUCCI Alessandro CHYTRÝ Milan DENGLER Jürgen GARBOLINO Emmanuel GOLUB Valentin GÜLER Behlül JANDT Ute JANSEN Jan JAŠKOVÁ Anni JIMÉNEZ-ALFARO Borja KARGER Dirk Nikolaus KATTGE Jens KNOLLOVÁ Ilona MIDOLO Gabriele MOESLUND Jesper Erenskjold PIELECH Remigiusz RAŠOMAVIČIUS Valerijus RUSINA Solvita ŠIBÍK Jozef STANČIĆ Zvjezdana STANISCI Angela SVENNING Jens-Christian YAMALOV Sergey ZIMMERMANN Niklaus E. BRUELHEIDE Helge

Year of publication 2023
Type Article in Periodical
Magazine / Source Nature Communications
MU Faculty or unit

Faculty of Science

Citation
Web https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36240-6
Doi http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36240-6
Keywords climate conditions; climate effect; functional morphology; habitat; leaf area; plant community; root; seed
Description Ecological theory predicts close relationships between macroclimate and functional traits. Yet, global climatic gradients correlate only weakly with the trait composition of local plant communities, suggesting that important factors have been ignored. Here, we investigate the consistency of climate-trait relationships for plant communities in European habitats. Assuming that local factors are better accounted for in more narrowly defined habitats, we assigned > 300,000 vegetation plots to hierarchically classified habitats and modelled the effects of climate on the community-weighted means of four key functional traits using generalized additive models. We found that the predictive power of climate increased from broadly to narrowly defined habitats for specific leaf area and root length, but not for plant height and seed mass. Although macroclimate generally predicted the distribution of all traits, its effects varied, with habitat-specificity increasing toward more narrowly defined habitats. We conclude that macroclimate is an important determinant of terrestrial plant communities, but future predictions of climatic effects must consider how habitats are defined.
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