Does hairiness matter in harare? Resolving controversy in global comparisons of plant trait responses to ecosystem disturbance

Abstract

Land use changes and their interaction with atmospheric and climatic changes represent a major challenge to humanity. However, despite the wealth of literature about plant traits in general, such as leaf size and texture or canopy height, we still know amazingly little about the links between these traits and responses to disturbance of the ecosystem. Most of the empirical work on functional traits has focused on plant responses to resources and climate (Chapin et al., 1996; Grime et al., 1997; Cunningham et al., 1999; Fonseca et al., 2000), rather than to disturbances, such as changing resources, substrate availability or the physical environment (Pickett & White, 1985). In addition, plant classifications used in large-scale models have deliberately restricted the numbers of functional types and traits used, in order to reflect broad responses to climate. What is to be done?