Understanding the syndromes in functional trait variation is crucial for comprehending the diversity of plant adaptive strategies and predicting the response of ecosystem functions to environmental changes. One of the essential functional syndromes in plant ecology is the "leaf economics spectrum." This spectrum represents a trade-off relationship between "acquisitive" and "conservative" plant strategies. According to this trade-off, fast-growing plants with low-cost leaves at one end of the spectrum tend to be less defensive to herbivores or physical stress and more decomposable after they fall. On the other hand, slow-growing plants with high-cost leaves at the other end tend to be more defensive and less decomposable. However, it is still unknown if this simple expectation holds in highly diverse natural forest ecosystems. Particularly, it is important to investigate the relationship between plant functional traits associated with productivity and decomposability, and how they relate to environmental conditions to accurately predict the response of carbon dynamics to environmental changes.
In this talk, I will study the relationships between leaf functional traits related to productivity, herbivory, and decomposability to identify functional trait syndromes in various forest ecosystems from temperate to tropical forests. I will also investigate which factors, including environmental conditions and phylogeny, are related to the variation in studied functional traits at different scales. Finally, I will discuss how the ecosystem functions respond to environmental changes and what factors make the responses complex in natural forest ecosystems.