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.

Biography

Leander D. L. Anderegg is fascinated by the landscape-scale consequences of plant physiology. His research explores how plant functional traits fit together to form whole-organism ecophysiological strategies, and how these strategies underpin ecological phenomena such as drought-induced forest mortality and geographic ranges. He is particularly interested in what within-species physiological variation across stress gradients and emerging remote sensing techniques can tell us about how ecophysiology scales up to the landscape.