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From tropics to tundra: Global convergence in plant functioning

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Reich, Peter B., Walters, Michael B., Ellsworth, David S.·1997·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Abstract

Despite striking differences in climate, soils, and evolutionary history among diverse biomes ranging from tropical and temperate forests to alpine tundra and desert, we found similar interspecific relationships among leaf structure and function and plant growth in all biomes. Our results thus demonstrate convergent evolution and global generality in plant functioning, despite the enormous diversity of plant species and biomes. For 280 plant species from two global data sets, we found that potential carbon gain (photosynthesis) and carbon loss (respiration) increase in similar proportion with decreasing leaf life-span, increasing leaf nitrogen concentration, and increasing leaf surface area-to-mass ratio. Productivity of individual plants and of leaves in vegetation canopies also changes in constant proportion to leaf life-span and surface area-to-mass ratio. These global plant functional relationships have significant implications for global scale modeling of vegetation–atmosphere CO 2 exchange.

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Metadata

Authors
Reich, P. B., Walters, M. B., & Ellsworth, D. S.
Venue
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Published
1997-12-09
Volume
94
Issue
25
Pages
13730-13734
ISSN
  • 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
  • 1091-6490
OpenAlex
W2031418293
Cited by
2,423
References
0
FWCI
38.57
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: From tropics to tundra: Global convergence in plant functioning. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1073/pnas.94.25.13730
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Reich, P. B., Walters, M. B., & Ellsworth, D. S. (1997). From tropics to tundra: Global convergence in plant functioning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.94.25.13730

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.