Botanic gardens are an untapped resource for studying the functional ecology of tropical plants.

ABSTRACT: Functional traits are increasingly used to understand the ecology of plants and to predict their responses to global changes. Unfortunately, trait data are unavailable for the majority of plant species. The lack of trait data is especially prevalent for hard-to-measure traits and for tropical plant species, potentially owing to the many inherent difficulties of working with species in remote, hyperdiverse rainforest systems. The living collections of botanic gardens provide convenient access to large numbers of tropical plant species and can potentially be used to quickly augment trait databases and advance our understanding of species' responses to climate change. In this review, we quantitatively assess the availability of trait data for tropical versus temperate species, the diversity o

SUBMITTER: Perez TM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6282089 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature