Fig. 4: Functional diversity of tropical forests in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
From: Canopy functional trait variation across Earth’s tropical forests
a, Functional trait space of trees across tropical forests in the Americas, Africa and Asia (including Australia), with principal component PC1 explaining 44% and PC2 20.6% of the variance in plant traits distributions. Arrows indicate the contribution and direction of each trait for the PCA. b, Distribution of functional trait space for the tropical American (left), African (middle) and Asian (right; including Australia) forests separately. a and b show the probabilistic density distribution defined by the PC1 and PC2 space of the 13 plant functional traits used: area, leaf area; C, leaf carbon concentration; Ca, leaf calcium concentration; K, leaf potassium concentration; Mg, leaf magnesium concentration; N, leaf nitrogen concentration; P, leaf phosphorus concentration; DM, leaf dry mass; FM, leaf fresh mass; SLA, specific leaf area; thickness, leaf thickness; WC, leaf water content; WD, wood density (see Extended Data Table 1 for a description of the trait used). The inner colour gradient represents the density of pixels in the PC trait space. Thick contour lines depict the 0.5 and 0.99 quantiles. FRich shows the functional richness and FDiv the functional divergence for the global trait space across continents (a) and for tropical American (b, left), African (b, middle) and Asian (b, right) forests. c, PC1 (top), PC2 (middle) and PC3 (bottom, explaining 13% of the variance) from a predicted across tropical forests. Co-occurring trait syndromes or strategies are shown, with insets magnified to show greater details of the predicted plant strategies.
