ArticleEcology letters2020
Leaf size of woody dicots predicts ecosystem primary productivity.
Article in Ecology letters, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed.
- Biogeography of community canopy leaf traits and their links to global forest photosynthesis.Science advances · 2026Article
- Phylogenetic Diversity Outperforms Functional Diversity in Predicting Aboveground Biomass Across Tree Strata in a Subtropical Forest.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Decoupled scaling relationship between bamboo individual size and leaf morphological characteristics.BMC plant biology · 2026Article
- Large slow-growing hydrophytes increase wetland carbon storage.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Leaf-Fruit Trait Decoupling Along Environmental Gradients in Tropical Cryptocaryeae (Lauraceae).Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Wetland productivity and stability increase more with average plant size than with plant functional diversity.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Using leaf and stomatal traits to predict biomass production and water use efficiency in Populus.The Plant journal : for cell and molecular biology · 2025Article
- Plant Acquisitive Strategies Promote Resistance and Temporal Stability of Semiarid Grasslands.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- The functional diversity-productivity relationship of woody plants is climatically sensitive.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Disentangling the relative contributions of variables determining the divergence of hoarding strategies of rodents.Current zoology · 2024Article
- Relationships of stomatal morphology to the environment across plant communities.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Geographical variation in functional traits of leaves of Caryopteris mongholica and the role of climate.BMC plant biology · 2023Article
- Plant diversity increases above- and below-ground biomass by regulating multidimensional functional trait characteristics.Annals of botany · 2023Article
- Human activities and species biological traits drive the long-term persistence of old trees in human-dominated landscapes.Nature plants · 2023Article
- Integrating multiple plant functional traits to predict ecosystem productivity.Communications biology · 2023Article
- Nitrogen addition strengthens the stabilizing effect of biodiversity on productivity by increasing plant trait diversity and species asynchrony in the artificial grassland communities.Frontiers in plant science · 2023Article
- Using Trait-Based Methods to Study the Response of Grassland to Fertilization in the Grassland in Semiarid Areas in the Loess Plateau of China.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Leaf Venation Architecture in Relation to Leaf Size Across Leaf Habits and Vein Types in Subtropical Woody Plants.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Precipitation and soil nutrients determine the spatial variability of grassland productivity at large scales in China.Frontiers in plant science · 2022Article
- Leaf size estimation based on leaf length, width and shape.Annals of botany · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
17 authors.
Funding
Abstract
A key challenge in ecology is to understand the relationships between organismal traits and ecosystem processes. Here, with a novel dataset of leaf length and width for 10 480 woody dicots in China and 2374 in North America, we show that the variation in community mean leaf size is highly correlated with the variation in climate and ecosystem primary productivity, independent of plant life form. These relationships likely reflect how natural selection modifies leaf size across varying climates in conjunction with how climate influences canopy total leaf area. We find that the leaf size-primary productivity functions based on the Chinese dataset can predict productivity in North America and vice-versa. In addition to advancing understanding of the relationship between a climate-driven trait and ecosystem functioning, our findings suggest that leaf size can also be a promising tool in palaeoecology for scaling from fossil leaves to palaeo-primary productivity of woody ecosystems.
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