Anderegg Leander D L
Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93117, USA.
New Phytol. 2023 Mar;237(6):1998-2004. doi: 10.1111/nph.18586. Epub 2022 Dec 15.
Plant functional traits are powerful ecological tools, but the relationships between plant traits and climate (or environmental variables more broadly) are often remarkably weak. This presents a paradox: Plant traits govern plant interactions with their environment, but the environment does not strongly predict the traits of plants living there. Unpacking this paradox requires differentiating the mechanisms of trait variation and potential confounds of trait-environment relationships at different evolutionary and ecological scales ranging from within species to among communities. It also necessitates a more integrated understanding of physiological and evolutionary equifinality among many traits and plant strategies, and challenges us to understand how supposedly 'functional' traits integrate into a whole-organism phenotype in ways that may be largely orthogonal to environmental tolerances.
植物功能性状是强大的生态学工具，但植物性状与气候（或更广泛意义上的环境变量）之间的关系往往非常微弱。这就产生了一个悖论：植物性状支配着植物与环境的相互作用，但环境并不能有力地预测生长在那里的植物的性状。解开这个悖论需要区分性状变异的机制以及在从物种内部到群落之间的不同进化和生态尺度上性状与环境关系的潜在混杂因素。这也需要对许多性状和植物策略之间的生理和进化等效性有更综合的理解，并促使我们去理解所谓的“功能”性状是如何以可能在很大程度上与环境耐受性正交的方式整合到整个生物体表型中的。
