Plant traits that drive ecosystems

DÍAZ, S

Missilac, Francia

Workshop; Forecasting dynamics of change using plant functional types; 2004

University of California at Irvine - Borchard Foundation

There are known ‘universal’ trade-offs between acquisitive and conservative trait syndromes, that appear consistent across biogreographical regions, floras and major taxa. Functional diversity, the range, value and relative abaundance of plant traits, apparantly is not too constrained by the size of the species pool. FD, on contrats, is strongly filtered by environmental factors, leading to functional similarity among the dominant plants species that coexist in a given system. It is these traits of locally dominant plants that drive ecosystem funcitoning. In this talk, I will discuss cases in which it works very well, cases in which it is not the whole story, and will also discuss some theorical approaches for which traits of the dominants don’t seem to matter at all.