Community assembly influences plant trait economic spectra and functional trade-offs at ecosystem scales

Abstract

Plant functional traits hold the potential to greatly improve the understanding and prediction of climate impacts on ecosystems and carbon cycle feedback to climate change. Traits are commonly used to place species along a global conservative-acquisitive trade-off, yet how and if functional traits and conservative-acquisitive trade-offs scale up to mediate community and ecosystem fluxes is largely unknown. Here, we combine functional trait datasets and multibiome datasets of forest water and carbon fluxes at the species, community, and ecosystem-levels to quantify the scaling of the tradeoff between maximum flux and sensitivity to vapor pressure deficit. We find a strong conservative-acquisitive trade-off at the species scale, which weakens modestly at the community scale and largely disappears at the ecosystem scale. Functional traits, particularly plant water transport (hydraulic) traits, are strongly associated with the key dimensions of the conservative-acquisitive trade-off at community and ecosystem scales, highlighting that trait composition appears to influence community and ecosystem flux dynamics. Our findings provide a foundation for improving carbon cycle models by revealing i) that plant hydraulic traits are most strongly associated with community- and ecosystem scale flux dynamics and ii) community assembly dynamics likely need to be considered explicitly, as they give rise to ecosystem-level flux dynamics that differ substantially from trade-offs identified at the species-level.