Representing plant diversity in land models: An evolutionary approach to make "Functional Types" more functional

Area of Science:

• Ecology
• Evolutionary Biology
• Climate Science

Background:

• Plants significantly influence Earth's climate, biogeochemistry, and hydrology through their traits.
• Current Earth System Models (ESMs) use simplified "Plant Functional Types" (PFTs) that inadequately represent plant diversity and ecological dynamics.
• Improving PFTs in ESMs is crucial for accurate climate change predictions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To review existing methods for incorporating plant diversity into ESMs.
• To propose an evolution-based framework for disaggregating plant functional diversity.
• To advocate for "Lineage Functional Types" (LFTs) for next-generation ESMs.

Main Methods:

• Reviewed current approaches to representing plant diversity in ESMs.
• Utilized findings on niche conservatism and evolutionary relatedness.
• Proposed LFTs based on dominant evolutionary lineages.

Main Results:

• Evolutionary relatedness is a robust proxy for plant functional similarities and differences.
• Niche conservatism provides a framework for grouping plants based on shared evolutionary history.
• LFTs offer an ecologically defensible and scalable method for ESM parameterization.

Conclusions:

• "Lineage Functional Types" provide a unified, tractable, and scalable approach to representing plant diversity in ESMs.
• This evolution-based framework can enhance model parameterization, process representation, and benchmarking.
• Integrating evolutionary history into ESMs will improve predictions of the Earth system's response to global change.