Functional traits and the growth-mortality trade-off in tropical trees.

By Stephen J. Wright, K. Kitajima, Nathan J B Kraft, Peter B. Reich, I. Wright, D. Bunker, Richard S. Condit, J. Dalling, Stuart Davies, Sandra Díaz and 7 more. Ecology, 2010

1,021 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A trade-off between growth and mortality rates characterizes tree species in closed canopy forests. This trade-off is maintained by inherent differences among species and spatial variation in light availability caused by canopy-opening disturbances. We evaluated conditions under which the trade-off is expressed and relationships with four key functional traits for 103 tree species from Barro Colorado Island, Panama. The trade-off is strongest for saplings for growth rates of the fastest growing individuals and mortality rates of the slowest growing individuals (r2 = 0.69), intermediate for saplings for average growth rates and overall mortality rates (r2 = 0.46), and much weaker for large trees (r2 < or = 0.10). This parallels likely levels of spatial variation in light availability, which is greatest for fast- vs. slow-growing saplings and least for large trees with foliage in the forest canopy. Inherent attributes of species contributing to the trade-off include abilities to disperse, acquire resources, grow rapidly, and tolerate shade and other stresses. There is growing interest in the possibility that functional traits might provide insight into such ecological differences and a growing consensus that seed mass (SM), leaf mass per area (LMA), wood density (WD), and maximum height (H(max)) are key traits among forest trees. Seed mass, LMA, WD, and H(max) are predicted to be small for light-demanding species with rapid growth and mortality and large for shade-tolerant species with slow growth and mortality. Six of these trait-demographic rate predictions were realized for saplings; however, with the exception of WD, the relationships were weak (r2 < 0.1 for three and r2 < 0.2 for five of the six remaining relationships). The four traits together explained 43-44% of interspecific variation in species positions on the growth-mortality trade-off; however, WD alone accounted for > 80% of the explained variation and, after WD was included, LMA and H(max) made insignificant contributions. Virtually the full range of values of SM, LMA, and H(max) occurred at all positions on the growth-mortality trade-off. Although WD provides a promising start, a successful trait-based ecology of tropical forest trees will require consideration of additional traits.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35df69f78969638deec3d04597b656eba30c4e6b

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Citations in the corpus

On the link between functional traits and growth rate: meta‐analysis shows effects change with plant size, as predicted (2016, background): “Several authors have suggested that the disappearance of SLA’s influence on growth might be due to a disproportionate accumulation of leaf area by individuals with low SLA (Reich, Walters & Ellsworth 1992; Poorter et al. 2008; Wright et al. 2010), yet it remains unclear whether such a mechanism work”
Fibre wall and lumen fractions drive wood density variation across 24 Australian angiosperms (2013, background): “Other studies examining association between vessel lumen fraction and wood density across a large number of species showed no relationship in the main trunks (Martı´nez-Cabrera et al. 2009; Poorter et al. 2010; Zanne et al. 2010) but a negative rela-tionshipintwigs(Preston etal.”
Causes and implications of the correlation between forest productivity and tree mortality rates (2011, background): “…(especially as manifested in the shade-tolerance continuum), and reproduction vs. persistence (as manifested in the continuum of adult tree stature) (Loehle 2000, Turner 2001, Poorter et al. 2003, 2006, Falster and Westoby 2005, Nascimento et al. 2005, Bohlman and O’Brien 2006, Wright et al. 2010).”
Influence of four major plant traits on average height, leaf‐area cover, net primary productivity, and biomass density in single‐species forests: a theoretical investigation (2011, background): “Long-term records of size-structured growth dynamics are accumulating for a variety of sites, and in some cases, are being supplemented with species trait data (e.g. Wright et al. 2010).”
Predicting tropical insect herbivore abundance from host plant traits and phylogeny (2012, methodology): “We chose this approach over Mantel tests because the latter lacks power and is known to involve high Type I error with phylogenetic information, whereas Blomberg’s K does not (Harmon and Glor 2010).”
The intrinsic dimensionality of plant traits and its relevance to community assembly (2014, background): “It also reflects a trade-off between growth rate and survival (Wright et al. 2010).”
The world‐wide ‘fast–slow’ plant economics spectrum: a traits manifesto (2014, background): “If three or four traits explain a modest fraction of the variance in distribution (e.g. Kraft & Ackerly 2010) or in growth and survival (e.g. Wright et al. 2010), but these are not the traits one would choose if trait data was unconstrained, the power of the available data is not necessarily a good…”
Above‐ground biomass is driven by mass‐ratio effects and stand structural attributes in a temperate deciduous forest (2018, background): “…relationship between species richness and forest productivity/AGB (Forrester & Bauhus, 2016; Gamfeldt et al., 2013; Paquette & Messier, 2011), although this relationship appears to be confined to relatively small spatial scales (Chisholm et al., 2013; Poorter et al., 2015; Wu et al., 2014).”