Fundamental tradeoffs generating the worldwide leaf economics spectrum

Recent work has identified a worldwide “economic” spectrum of correlated leaf traits that affects global patterns of nutrient cycling and primary productivity and that is used to calibrate vegetation–climate models. The correlation patterns are displayed by species from the arctic to the tropics and...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecology
Main Authors: Shipley, Bill, Lechowicz, Martin J, Wright, Ian, Reich, Peter B
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Ecological Society of America 2006
Subjects:
comparative ecology
leaf life span
leaf longevity
leaf mass per area
LMA
leaf nitrogen content
net photosynthetic rate
path analysis
specific leaf area
SLA
structural equations modeling
SEM
vanishing tetrads
Arctic
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/11299/174920
https://doi.org/10.1890/05-1051
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Summary:Recent work has identified a worldwide “economic” spectrum of correlated leaf traits that affects global patterns of nutrient cycling and primary productivity and that is used to calibrate vegetation–climate models. The correlation patterns are displayed by species from the arctic to the tropics and are largely independent of growth form or phylogeny. This generality suggests that unidentified fundamental constraints control the return of photosynthates on investments of nutrients and dry mass in leaves. Using novel graph theoretic methods and structural equation modeling, we show that the relationships among these variables can best be explained by assuming (1) a necessary trade-off between allocation to structural tissues versus liquid phase processes and (2) an evolutionary trade-off between leaf photosynthetic rates, construction costs, and leaf longevity.

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