Global climatic drivers of leaf size

By Ian J. Wright, N. Dong, V. Maire, I. C. Prentice, M. Westoby, Sandra Díaz, Rachael V. Gallagher, B. Jacobs, R. Kooyman, Elizabeth A. Law and 7 more. Science, 2017

829 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Leaf size, climate, and energy balance Why does plant leaf size increase at lower latitudes, as exemplified by the evolutionary success of species with very large leaves in the tropics? Wright et al. analyzed leaf data for 7670 plant species, along with climatic data, from 682 sites worldwide. Their findings reveal consistent patterns and explain why earlier predictions from energy balance theory had only limited success. The authors provide a fully quantitative explanation for the latitudinal gradient in leaf size, with implications for plant ecology and physiology, vegetation modeling, and paleobotany. Science, this issue p. 917 Day- and nighttime leaf-to-air temperature differences drive global gradients in leaf size. Leaf size varies by over a 100,000-fold among species worldwide. Although 19th-century plant geographers noted that the wet tropics harbor plants with exceptionally large leaves, the latitudinal gradient of leaf size has not been well quantified nor the key climatic drivers convincingly identified. Here, we characterize worldwide patterns in leaf size. Large-leaved species predominate in wet, hot, sunny environments; small-leaved species typify hot, sunny environments only in arid conditions; small leaves are also found in high latitudes and elevations. By modeling the balance of leaf energy inputs and outputs, we show that daytime and nighttime leaf-to-air temperature differences are key to geographic gradients in leaf size. This knowledge can enrich “next-generation” vegetation models in which leaf temperature and water use during photosynthesis play key roles.

Subfields: Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e45875b6c7daf9788a9fe75260117dfcde0721b7

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Citations in the corpus

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).”
sPlot – A new tool for global vegetation analyses (2019, methodology): “Nevertheless, only the gridbased approach has been used to date in studies of the geographic distribution of trait values (e.g., Swenson et al., 2012, 2017; Wright et al., 2017).”