Which is a better predictor of plant traits: temperature or precipitation?

By A. Moles, S. Perkins, Shawn William Laffan, Habacuc Flores‐Moreno, Monica Awasthy, M. Tindall, L. Sack, Andy Pitman, Jens Kattge, Lonnie W. Aarssen and 48 more. 2014

440 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Question: Are plant traits more closely correlated with mean annual temperature, or with mean annual precipitation? Location: Global. Methods: We quantified the strength of the relationships between temperature and precipitation and 21 plant traits from 447,961 species-site combinations worldwide. We used meta-analysis to provide an overall answer to our question.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d2e04e7f01691fdf0843806d6cdbd66e4674395c

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Ecological Modeling

1. C. Violle
2. Peter B. Reich
3. Brian J. Enquist
4. Brian J. McGill
5. B. Blonder
6. Brody Sandel
7. Nathan J B Kraft
8. S. Hobbie

In Global and Planetary Change

1. Peter B. Reich
2. C. Violle
3. Brian J. Enquist
4. J. H. C. Cornelissen
5. A. Moles
6. G. T. Freschet
7. T. Ocheltree
8. Dali Guo

In Nature and Landscape Conservation

1. Peter B. Reich
2. C. Violle
3. J. H. C. Cornelissen
4. Brian J. Enquist
5. G. T. Freschet
6. A. Moles
7. C. Roumet
8. Nathan J B Kraft

Citations in the corpus

• Trait selection and community weighting are key to understanding ecosystem responses to changing precipitation regimes (2018, background): “…relationships can be used to identify plant “response traits,” a key research objective in community ecology (Suding et al., 2008); however, precipitation explains very little global variation in commonly measured plant traits (Forrestel et al., 2017; Moles et al., 2014; Wright et al., 2004).”
• Climate, soil and plant functional types as drivers of global fine‐root trait variation (2017, background): “…above-ground traits representative of fast return on investment and resource availability (Ordo~nez et al. 2009; Swenson et al. 2012; but see Moles et al. 2014; Maire et al. 2015), and acknowledging growing evidence for significant coordination between plant traits above-ground and fineroot…”
• Spatial patterns and climate relationships of major plant traits in the New World differ between woody and herbaceous species (2018, background): “Trait–environment correlations are often weak (e.g. r2 .3 in Moles et al., 2014) and the strength and sign of these correlations can vary across studies.”
• Being John Harper: Using evolutionary ideas to improve understanding of global patterns in plant traits (2018, background): “Leaf area tends to increase with temperature (Gallagher & Leishman, 2012; Guittar et al., 2016; Moles et al., 2014; Wright et al., 2017), and there is a relatively strong (R2 = .28) latitudinal gradient in leaf size, with the largest leaves in the tropics (Wright et al., 2017).”
• Factors Influencing Leaf Chlorophyll Content in Natural Forests at the Biome Scale (2018, background): “At a large scale, the patterns of leaf traits are not obvious along the changing environmental gradient, with greater variability occurring in species that coexist (Freschet et al., 2011; Onoda et al., 2011; Moles et al., 2014).”