Research Progress

Research Advances of Plant Leaf Traits at Different Ecology Scales

Updatetime:2012-09-13From:

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Plant leaf traits are associated with fundamental behavior and function of plant individual, community, and ecosystem. It can reflect plant survival strategy response to different environmental factors. The researchers synthesize the research advance on leaf traits at different ecology scale, such as individual scale, functional group scale, community scale and global scale. Individual scale focuses on the leaf traits response to environment factor or muti-factors, such as temperature, soil moisture and soil nutrient. The differences of leaf traits occur among different functional groups, it probably is an outcome of environment selection, and the selective pressure is relatively weak within each group. As the community structure changes, the leaf traits average value of the community and the leaf traits of the dominate species also changes. Studies at large-scale reveal that high level of trait disparity is observed within community, compared with the variation among sites that may reflect large-scale climatic factors. Although ecologist quantitatively compares some variations on different scales, but these differences are implicit, and they are rarely explicitly stated. Further studies should focus on how plant leaf traits response to muti-enviroment factors? What's the plant leaf traits functional behavior in the community assembly processes? Are there biogeographically patterns of global leaf traits? Ecological relationships also differ among scales. Plant trait correlations could also be scale-dependent, in other words, how scaling leaf traits data from individual to community or global scale should be explicitly stated.

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