Climate regulation processes are linked to the functional composition of plant communities in European forests, shrublands, and grasslands

© 2024 The Authors. Global Change Biology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

Terrestrial ecosystems affect climate by reflecting solar irradiation, evaporative cooling, and carbon sequestration. Yet very little is known about how plant traits affect climate regulation processes (CRPs) in different habitat types. Here, we used linear and random forest models to relate the community-weighted mean and variance values of 19 plant traits (summarized into eight trait axes) to the climate-adjusted proportion of reflected solar irradiation, evapotranspiration, and net primary productivity across 36,630 grid cells at the European extent, classified into 10 types of forest, shrubland, and grassland habitats. We found that these trait axes were more tightly linked to log evapotranspiration (with an average of 6.2% explained variation) and the proportion of reflected solar irradiation (6.1%) than to net primary productivity (4.9%). The highest variation in CRPs was explained in forest and temperate shrubland habitats. Yet, the strength and direction of these relationships were strongly habitat-dependent. We conclude that any spatial upscaling of the effects of plant communities on CRPs must consider the relative contribution of different habitat types.

The 2019–2020 BiodivERsA joint call for research proposals, under the BiodivClim ERA-Net COFUND program, and with the funding organizations Swiss National Science Foundation SNF (project: FeedBaCks, 193907), Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR-20-EBI5-0001-05), the German Research Foundation (DFG BR 1698/21-1, DFG HI 1538/16-1), and the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (SS70010002) funded this research and the position of S.K. and G.M. The Basque Government (IT1487-22) supported the work of I.B. The Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS P1-0236) supported the work of A.C. The University of Latvia (grant no. AAP2016/B041//Zd2016/AZ03) supported the work of S.R. The VILLUM FONDEN (grant 16549) funded the VILLUM Investigator project “Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World” which supported the work of J.C.S. J.C.S. also considers this work a contribution to Center for Ecological Dynamics in a Novel Biosphere (ECONOVO), funded by Danish National Research Foundation (grant DNRF173).

Article Funding: Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

Peer reviewed