Abstract
Key message
Resource-limited environments showed a tendency towards conservative and coupled leaf and wood traits, while displaying an acquisitive and decoupled pattern in resource-rich ones. Water and elevation were the most studied gradients.
Abstract
In the Neotropics, spatial and temporal environmental gradients subject plants to distinct abiotic conditions, requiring functional adjustments. This promotes changes in trait expression, resulting in individual trait variation or covariation. We have systematically reviewed the literature focusing on leaf and wood traits in the Neotropics along major abiotic gradients (water, irradiance, temperature, soil fertility, and elevation), and assessed their spatial and temporal variation and covariation trends. Thus, we compiled 141 published papers from 2010 to 2022. Most of the studies of leaf and wood traits were related to: (1) the gradients of water avalability and elevation, (2) leaf traits at the expense of wood traits, with specific leaf area and wood density the most studied traits, respectively, (3) the morphological leaf traits to a greater extent than to biochemical, ecophysiological, or anatomical ones. In general, more conservative traits were observed in environments with lower resource availability. Although there is still no consensus, coupling was predominantly linked to water balance during periods of water restriction or in dry ecosystems, and papers have focused on single ecosystems rather than making comparisons across multiple ecosystems. This systematic review highlights the tendency for systems with fewer resources to show a bias towards greater coordination between leaf and wood traits compared to systems with more resources. This review also adresses how traits are expressed based on the integration of more than one environmental driver and the qualitative variation of these resources. Finally, we emphasize the importance of analyzing different aspects of trait expression when assessing species’ responses to environmental gradients, especially in megadiverse regions such as the Neotropics.
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Acknowledgements
GVF thanks the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—CAPES—for a doctoral scholarship—Finance Code 001. APV and MDC are grateful to the Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—CNPq—for providing a PQ scholarship (process #302325/2022-0, 308267/2021-4). We thank Ana Luíza Soares Araújo and Julia Pereira Vicente for their assistance with table organization in the supplementary material. We thank John Ditty for linguistic advice. We also thank the reviewers for their valuable comments that helped to improve the manuscript.
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This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—Finance Code 001. The Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) provided financial support to APV and MDC (process #302325/2022-0, 308267/2021-4) for a PQ scholarship.
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de Freitas, G.V., Da Cunha, M. & Vitória, A.P. A systematic review of leaf and wood traits in the Neotropics: environmental gradients and functionality. Trees (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-024-02508-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00468-024-02508-7