Drivers of Acacia and Eucalyptus growth rate differ in strength and direction in restoration plantings across Australia.

ABSTRACT: Functional traits are proxies for a species' ecology and physiology and are often correlated with plant vital rates. As such they have the potential to guide species selection for restoration projects. However, predictive trait-based models often only explain a small proportion of plant performance, suggesting that commonly measured traits do not capture all important ecological differences between species. Some residual variation in vital rates may be evolutionarily conserved and captured using taxonomic groupings alongside common functional traits. We tested this hypothesis using growth rate data for 17,299 trees and shrubs from 80 species of Eucalyptus and 43 species of Acacia, two hyper-diverse and co-occurring genera, collected from 497 neighborhood plots in 137 Australian mixed-speci

SUBMITTER: Staples TL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9539508 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature