Each individual plant grows, reproduces, interacts - and dies on its own: I am fascinated by the manifold ways plants are shaped and shape ecosystems. Specifically, I am interested in their strategy to survive and how this strategy relates to ecosystem functioning. For example, if you were a tree, your strategy in life was to be tall. You can compete for light to feed on CO2. But: you but cannot escape climatic hardships as a seed in the soil. Questions, I think about a lot are: (1) How do plant traits relate to the environment? (2) How much does their strategy reflect their phylogenetic lineage vs. how large is the plasticity within groups of plants that ultimately defines where they can grow? (3) Which scale is meaningful for ecologic process understanding, given our data basis?
I am working with in-situ data, collected on the TRY database. In my PhD at the University of Zürich and the Max-Planck-Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena with a research stay at the Industrial University of Santander, I explored plant traits intrinsic patterns as well as their global associations with climate and soil. During my PostDoc I am including functional diversity – environment relationships, and hope to scale down to local, airborne hyperspectral intra-specific variability of Fagus sylvatica in Europe.
I believe global and local signals of plant traits can mount into an understanding of biosphere-environment interactions, biologic diversity patterns, which ultimately allow informed management decisions for global to local environmental resources.
Climatic and soil factors explain the two-dimensional spectrum of global plant trait variation
JULIA S. JOSWIG1, CHRISTIAN WIRTH, MEREDITH C. SCHUMAN, JENS KATTGE, BJÖRN REU, IAN J. WRIGHT, SEBASTIAN D. SIPPEL, NADJA RÜGER, RONNY RICHTER, MICHAEL E. SCHAEPMAN, PETER M. VAN BODEGOM, J. H. C. CORNELISSEN, SANDRA DÍAZ, WESLEY N. HATTINGH, KOEN KRAMER, FREDERIC LENS, ÜLO NIINEMETS, PETER B. REICH, MARKUS REICHSTEIN, CHRISTINE RÖMERMANN, FRANZISKA SCHRODT, MADHUR ANAND, MICHAEL BAHN, CHAEHO BYUN, GIANDIEGO CAMPATELLA, BRUNO E. L. CERABOLINI, JOSEPH M. CRAINE, ANDRES GONZALEZ-MELO, ALVARO G. GUTIERREZ, TIANHUA HE, PEDRO HIGUCHI, HERVÉ JACTEL, NATHAN J. B. KRAFT, VANESSA MINDEN, VLADIMIR ONIPCHENKO, JOSEP PEÑUELAS, VALÉRIO D. PILLAR, ÊNIO SOSINSKI, NADEJDA A. SOUDZILOVSKAIA, EVAN WEIHER & MIGUEL D. MAHECHA
1University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland
Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land–climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variation at the organ and plant level and (2) leaf economics balancing leaf persistence against plant growth potential. The orthogonality of these two principal components suggests they are differently influenced by environmental drivers. We find these axes persist in a global dataset of 17 in-situ traits across more than 20,000 species. We find with ridge regression models and hierarchical partitioning a dominant joint effect of climate and soil on trait variation. Additional independent climate effects are also observed across most traits, whereas independent soil effects are almost exclusively observed for economics traits. Variation in size traits correlates well with a latitudinal gradient related to water or energy limitation. In contrast, variation in economics traits is better explained by interactions of climate with soil fertility. These findings have the potential to improve our understanding of biodiversity patterns and our predictions of climate change impacts on biogeochemical cycles.