Cited by 143Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics StudiesPlant Water Relations and Carbon DynamicsPlant responses to elevated CO2

Robust leaf trait relationships across species under global environmental changes

Open access
Cui, Erqian, Weng, Ensheng, Yan, Enrong, Xia, Jianyang·2020·Nature Communications

Abstract

Recent studies show coordinated relationships between plant leaf traits and their capacity to predict ecosystem functions. However, how leaf traits will change within species and whether interspecific trait relationships will shift under future environmental changes both remain unclear. Here, we examine the bivariate correlations between leaf economic traits of 515 species in 210 experiments which mimic climate warming, drought, elevated CO 2 , and nitrogen deposition. We find divergent directions of changes in trait-pairs between species, and the directions mostly do not follow the interspecific trait relationships. However, the slopes in the logarithmic transformed interspecific trait relationships hold stable under environmental changes, while only their elevations vary. The elevation changes of trait relationship are mainly driven by asymmetrically interspecific responses contrary to the direction of the leaf economic spectrum. These findings suggest robust interspecific trait relationships under global changes, and call for linking within-species responses to interspecific coordination of plant traits.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41467-020-16839-9

Cites

68 of 68 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 69 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Cui, E., Weng, E., Yan, E., & Xia, J.
Affiliations
  • State Key Laboratory of Estuarine and Coastal Research (CN)
  • Columbia University (US)
Corresponding author
Xia, Jianyang
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2020-06-12
Volume
11
Issue
1
Pages
2999-2999
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3034255665
Cited by
143
References
69
Citations by year
2026: 18 · 2025: 29 · 2024: 33 · 2023: 24 · 2022: 27 · 2021: 10 · 2020: 2
FWCI
10.01
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Columbia Academic Commons (Columbia University)
Funders
National Natural Science Foundation of China (31722009, 41630528)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Nature and Landscape Conservation › Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies
  • Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Global and Planetary Change › Plant Water Relations and Carbon Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Plant responses to elevated CO2
Keywords
leaf economic traits, leaf economics spectrum, global warming, drought, elevated CO2, nitrogen deposition, trait coordination, global change, plant functional traits
MeSH terms
Algorithms, Carbon Dioxide, Models, Biological, Nitrogen, Phenotype, Plants, Species Specificity, Ecosystem, Plant Leaves, Droughts, Climate Change, Global Warming

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review