Fig. 1: Conceptual diagram of how tree level adaptations with respect to water stress scale up to biogeographic patterns of trait associations at the level of forest communities.
From: Mapping multi-dimensional variability in water stress strategies across temperate forests
a Trees have several possible functional pathways that affect their response to water stress7,9,17. b These pathways combine into different potential species-level strategies, which include structurally conservative, early stomatal closure to avoid water loss, water storage and deep rooting. c Species assemble into communities, where the combination of their strategies controls community form and function. Community-level functional traits are calculated as their community-weighted mean of each species within a community. Co-variation of these traits, as assessed using principal component analysis (PCA), can identify the trait associations at the community level, which in most cases are expected to reflect the underlying strategies within each community. d Biogeographic patterns of these associations are expected to emerge as a function of broad-scale patterns in climate65. This figure is created in BioRender. Zhang, C. (2024) BioRender.com/s74n436.
