Leaf size of woody dicots predicts ecosystem primary productivity

Yaoqi Li, Peter B. Reich, Bernhard Schmid, Nawal Shrestha, Xiao Feng, Tong Lyu, Brian S. Maitner, Xiaoting Xu, Yichao Li, Dongting Zou, Zheng Hong Tan, Xiangyan Su, Zhiyao Tang, Qinghua Guo, Xiaojuan Feng, Brian J. Enquist, Zhiheng Wang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

48 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A key challenge in ecology is to understand the relationships between organismal traits and ecosystem processes. Here, with a novel dataset of leaf length and width for 10 480 woody dicots in China and 2374 in North America, we show that the variation in community mean leaf size is highly correlated with the variation in climate and ecosystem primary productivity, independent of plant life form. These relationships likely reflect how natural selection modifies leaf size across varying climates in conjunction with how climate influences canopy total leaf area. We find that the leaf size‒primary productivity functions based on the Chinese dataset can predict productivity in North America and vice-versa. In addition to advancing understanding of the relationship between a climate-driven trait and ecosystem functioning, our findings suggest that leaf size can also be a promising tool in palaeoecology for scaling from fossil leaves to palaeo-primary productivity of woody ecosystems.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1003-1013
Number of pages11
JournalEcology Letters
Volume23
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2020
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Annual evapotranspiration
  • China
  • North America
  • community mean leaf size
  • large-scale eco-evolutionary patterns
  • leaf area index
  • palaeo-primary productivity
  • plant functional traits

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