Functional traits mediate seedling survival response to climate in a temperate forest.

ABSTRACT: Functional traits are increasingly used to forecast the response of plant performance to abiotic and biotic conditions. However, it remains unclear how functional traits will mediate the complex responses of plants to interactive drivers in a rapidly changing world. Here, we collected 17-year monitoring data on seedlings of 28 locally coexisting species and 8 functional traits in a temperate forest, and built multi-level regression models to evaluate (1) whether seedling survival varied among species along the acquisitive-conservative strategy gradient, and which functional trait affected seedling survival; and (2) how survival of species with different functional strategies responded to negative density dependence (NDD) and climate variation. We found that species with an acquisitive stra

SUBMITTER: Xu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12744606 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature