Why can’t we predict traits from the environment? Pondering persistent problems in plant functional ecology

SemIDEEV
 27/03/2026
 12:00:00
 Leander Anderegg, University of California Santa Barbara, USA
 IDEEV - Salle Rosalind Franklin

Abstract: Plant functional traits are powerful ecological tools, but the relationships between plant traits and climate (or environmental variables more broadly) are often remarkably weak. This presents a paradox: Plant traits govern plant interactions with their environment, but the environment does not strongly predict the traits of plants living there. Unpacking this paradox requires differentiating the mechanisms of trait variation and potential confounds of trait–environment relationships at different evolutionary and ecological scales ranging from within species to among communities. However, even after we sift through the problems of scale and sampling that plague many of our analyses, we find that trait-environment relationships often remain disappointing. This suggests that we may need to look critically at some of our underlying assumptions in plant functional ecology. In particular, I argue that we need a more integrated understanding of physiological and evolutionary equifinality among many traits and plant strategies, and a better grasp on how supposedly ‘functional’ traits integrate into a whole-organism phenotype in ways that may be largely orthogonal to environmental tolerances.