Although the evidence is still limited, a growing body of research suggests music may have beneficial effects for diseases such as Parkinson’s.
Image credit: Shutterstock/agsandrew.
New Research In
Physical Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Biological Sciences
Featured Portals
Articles by Topic
Edited by James H. Brown, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, and approved December 4, 2013 (received for review August 9, 2013)
Significance
Plants have evolved diverse life history strategies to succeed in Earth’s varied environments. Some species grow quickly, produce copious seeds, and die within a few weeks. Other species grow slowly and rarely produce seeds but live thousands of years. We show that simple morphological measurements can predict where a species falls within the global range of life history strategies: species with large seeds, long-lived leaves, or dense wood have population growth rates influenced primarily by survival, whereas individual growth and fecundity have a stronger influence on the dynamics of species with small seeds, short-lived leaves, or soft wood. This finding increases the ability of scientists to represent complex population processes with a few easily measured character traits.
Abstract
Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions, dynamics, and responses to environmental change based on easily measured anatomical and morphological traits. Trait-based approaches assume that simple functional traits influence fitness and life history evolution, but rigorous tests of this assumption are lacking, because they require quantitative information about the full lifecycles of many species representing different life histories. Here, we link a global traits database with empirical matrix population models for 222 species and report strong relationships between functional traits and plant life histories. Species with large seeds, long-lived leaves, or dense wood have slow life histories, with mean fitness (i.e., population growth rates) more strongly influenced by survival than by growth or fecundity, compared with fast life history species with small seeds, short-lived leaves, or soft wood. In contrast to measures of demographic contributions to fitness based on whole lifecycles, analyses focused on raw demographic rates may underestimate the strength of association between traits and mean fitness. Our results help establish the physiological basis for plant life history evolution and show the potential for trait-based approaches in population dynamics.
Footnotes
- ↵1To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: peter.adler{at}usu.edu.
Author contributions: P.B.A., R.S.-G., A.C., J.S.H., and J.R.-M. designed research; P.B.A., R.S.-G., A.C., J.S.H., J.R.-M., C.M.-A., and M.F. performed research; P.B.A., R.S.-G., and M.F. analyzed data; and P.B.A., R.S.-G., J.S.H., J.R.-M., and M.F. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
Data deposition: The data have been deposited in Data Dryad, http://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8g252.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1315179111/-/DCSupplemental.
Plant functional traits and life histories
Sign up for Article Alerts
Jump to section
You May Also be Interested in
Astronomers thought they’d finally figured out where gold and other heavy elements in the universe came from. In light of recent results, they’re not so sure.
Image credit: Science Source/Tom McHugh.
Researchers are still trying to understand what causes this strong correlation between neural and social networks.
Image credit: Shutterstock/Yeongsik Im.
Aleix Martinez explains why facial expressions often are not accurate indicators of emotion.
CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing can improve the effectiveness of spermatogonial stem cell transplantation in mice and livestock, a study finds.
Image credit: Jon M. Oatley.