植物功能生物地理学的研究进展与展望

Functional biogeography of plants:research progresses and challenges

功能生物地理学研究性状及其多样性的时空分布变化、生态成因及其对生态系统功能的影响。近十来年,功能生物地理学领域发展迅速,性状数据呈指数增长,基于性状探索物种分布、群落结构和组成以及生态系统功能对环境变化响应的研究取得了重要进展。该文综述了植物功能生物地理学的核心内涵、发展历史、主要研究进展和未来展望。性状是功能生物地理学的研究核心,该文先总结了植物叶、茎、根、花、果实和种子等器官和整株关键性状的地理格局及其与环境间的关系,表明性状变异是植物适应进化和环境筛选的结果;概述了功能多样性的常用指标、地理分布与生态成因;介绍了性状数据的主要来源与性状缺失值的填充方法。随后,综述了植物性状间的关联与权衡,重点介绍了叶经济谱和植物经济谱的发展,指出其反映了植物对关键资源(如碳、养分和水分)的获取与分配策略;概述了基于性状预测物种分布的依据与进展,以及性状多样性与生态系统功能间的关系。在此基础上,提出了功能生物地理学研究所面临的挑战,强调未来研究要关注多性状在种内和种间的协同与权衡关系,将研究精度从物种水平推进到个体水平,采用性状网络等方法定量化性状间的关系及其对环境变化的响应,关注植物跨尺度的适应;并指出如何将现有的研究进展应用于新一代植被模型的改进,指导基于功能的植物多样性保护等是未来研究的重点和难点。

Functional biogeography studies the spatio-temporal variations in patterns of traits and functional diversity,their ecological determinants and effects on ecosystem functioning.With the exponential growth in trait data,this field has developed rapidly in the recent decades and made major progress in exploring the response of species distribution,community structure and composition,and ecosystem properties on environmental changes based on traits.In this paper,we reviewed core objectives,historical developments,main research advance and future directions in the field of plant functional biogeography.Traits are the focus of research in functional biogeography.Here,we first described major findings on the spatial patterns of key traits in plant organs(i.e.leaves,stems,roots,and flowers,along with fruits and seeds)to the whole plants,and their relationships with environment,showing that traits variations are the results of plant adaptive evolution and environmental filtering.Secondly,we summarized the indicators of functional diversity,assessed the spatial distributions of functional diversity,and identified their determinants.We also summarized the main data sources of traits and related gap-filling approaches.Next,we reviewed trait associations and trade-offs among and within organs as well as in the entire plants,focusing on the global leaf economics spectrums and wood economics spectrum,and pointing out the strategies of plants to obtain and allocate important resource(i.e.carbon,nutrients and water).We summarized how trait-based approaches help to predict species distribution,and the link between trait diversity with ecosystem functions.We highlighted the challenges in current research and emphasized the importance to focus on the coordination and trade-offs among multiple traits along with both inter-and intra-specific trait variation in future research,transferring species-based models to individual-based ones,and to adopt approaches like trait networks to quantify the links among traits and their response to environmental changes,further to explore adaptation of plants across scales.Meanwhile,we suggested potential improvement in application of current research advances,which may be useful in constructing next-generation vegetation models and guiding the function-based conservation of plant diversity in future research.