Distinct Responses of Leaf Traits to Environment and Phylogeny Between Herbaceous and Woody Angiosperm Species in China

Nannan An; Nan Lu; Bojie Fu; Mengyu Wang; Nianpeng He

doi:10.3389/fpls.2021.799401

Distinct Responses of Leaf Traits to Environment and Phylogeny Between Herbaceous and Woody Angiosperm Species in China

Front Plant Sci. 2021 Dec 7:12:799401. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2021.799401. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Nannan An^{1

2}, Nan Lu^{1

2}, Bojie Fu^{1

2

3}, Mengyu Wang^{1

2}, Nianpeng He^{2

4}

Affiliations

¹ State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
² University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
³ Faculty of Geographical Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Ecosystem Network Observation and Modeling, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.

Abstract

Leaf traits play key roles in plant resource acquisition and ecosystem processes; however, whether the effects of environment and phylogeny on leaf traits differ between herbaceous and woody species remains unclear. To address this, in this study, we collected data for five key leaf traits from 1,819 angiosperm species across 530 sites in China. The leaf traits included specific leaf area, leaf dry matter content, leaf area, leaf N concentration, and leaf P concentration, all of which are closely related to trade-offs between resource uptake and leaf construction. We quantified the relative contributions of environment variables and phylogeny to leaf trait variation for all species, as well as for herbaceous and woody species separately. We found that environmental factors explained most of the variation (44.4-65.5%) in leaf traits (compared with 3.9-23.3% for phylogeny). Climate variability and seasonality variables, in particular, mean temperature of the warmest and coldest seasons of a year (MTWM/MTWQ and MTCM/MTCQ) and mean precipitation in the wettest and driest seasons of a year (MPWM/MPWQ and MPDM/MPDQ), were more important drivers of leaf trait variation than mean annual temperature (MAT) and mean annual precipitation (MAP). Furthermore, the responses of leaf traits to environment variables and phylogeny differed between herbaceous and woody species. Our study demonstrated the different effects of environment variables and phylogeny on leaf traits among different plant growth forms, which is expected to advance the understanding of plant adaptive strategies and trait evolution under different environmental conditions.

Keywords: angiosperm species; climate variability and seasonality; functional biogeography; leaf traits; phylogeny; plant growth form.