Plant Traits 2.0 : state of the art and future perspectives for research on plant functional traits in Italy : book of abstracts

In the decade since the last ‘Plant Traits’ meeting hosted in Torino in July 2007, several aspects of plant primary functioning have been confirmed at the global scale. These include the observation that the leaf economics spectrum forms part of an overall ‘plant economics spectrum’, or a trade-off between investment of resources in perennial tissues or the early use of resources in reproduction. A secondary spectrum, the ‘plant size spectrum’, is heavily involved in plant competitive ability and has been confirmed to involve the integration of size-related traits at the level of seeds, organs and whole plants. Very recently this has been explained by the ‘seed-phytomer-leaf theory’ of Hodgson, which relates meristem size in seeds and phytomers and their capacity to produce and support single organs. These major axes of plant functional variability work together to form the ‘Global spectrum of plant form and function’. This provides a framework in which plant primary functioning can be quantified and compared amongst species and individuals. It has also been recognized to represent major axes of variability predicted by theories such as Grime’s CSR (competitor, stress-tolerator, ruderal) adaptive strategy theory. Recently, common traits collected world-wide and representing the global spectrum have been used to produce a practical tool to allow adaptive strategy classification, in which plant life forms as diverse as aquatic herbs and tropical rainforest trees can be compared on an equal footing. This has been applied to investigate strategy variability across biomes world-wide and to compare plant communities along environmental gradients. We will present an up-to-date picture of the use of these tools as they are currently being used to investigate plant community properties and ecosystem processes world-wide. Based on current research activities, we suggest some possible directions for future work.