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Abstract

Plants cope with the environment by displaying large phenotypic variation. Two spectra of global plant form and function have been identified: a size spectrum from small to tall species with increasing stem tissue density, leaf size, and seed mass; a leaf economics spectrum reflecting slow to fast returns on investments in leaf nutrients and carbon. When species assemble to communities it is assumed that these spectra are filtered by the environment to produce community level functional composition. It is unknown what are the main drivers for community functional composition in a large area such as Amazonia. We use 13 functional traits, including wood density, seed mass, leaf characteristics, breeding system, nectar production, fruit type, and root characteristics of 812 tree genera (5211 species), and find that they describe two main axes found at the global scale. At community level, the first axis captures not only the ‘fast-slow spectrum’, but also most size-related traits. Climate and disturbance explain a minor part of this variance compared to soil fertility. Forests on poor soils differ largely in terms of trait values from those on rich soils. Trait composition and soil fertility exert a strong influence on forest functioning: biomass and relative biomass production.

Item ID:	94523
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	2399-3642
Copyright Information:	Copyright © 2025, The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Date Deposited:	29 Oct 2026 05:09
FoR Codes:	31 BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES > 3103 Ecology > 310308 Terrestrial ecology @ 100%
SEO Codes:	18 ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT > 1806 Terrestrial systems and management > 180606 Terrestrial biodiversity @ 100%
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