Liu et al. conducted a meta-analysis to test the hypothesis that shade-induced increases in specific-leaf-area (SLA) indicate an adaptive plant response to optimizing light capture.
They conclude that species with greater SLA phenotypic plasticity were less able to maintain biomass under shade. Some of the plastic changes that are frequently thought to be adaptive may simply reflect passive responses to the environment, or occur as by-products of adaptive plastic responses in other traits.
How functional traits modify species niche occupancy and community assembly is a vital question in ecology. He et al. measure specific leaf area for over 5000 plants with more than 1700 observational locations.
Both phenotypic plasticity and local adaptation may allow widely distributed plant species to either acclimate or adapt to environmental heterogeneity. Given the typically low genetic variation of clonal plants across...
Heteroblasty, crowding and shade avoidance Acacia implexa shows leaf heteroblasty, developing compound, transitional and modified leaves (phyllodes), and previous experiments have shown that shade can alter the ontogeny...
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