Publications by authors named "Wesley N Hattingh"
Article Synopsis
- The 'Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset' includes mean values for six key vascular plant traits, essential for understanding plant variation.
- This dataset aggregates around 1 million trait records from the TRY database and other sources, encompassing 92,159 species mean values across 46,047 species.
- Comprehensive data quality management and validation ensure this is the largest and most reliable collection of empirical data on vascular plant traits available.
Plant functional traits can predict community assembly and ecosystem functioning and are thus widely used in global models of vegetation dynamics and land-climate feedbacks. Still, we lack a global understanding of how land and climate affect plant traits. A previous global analysis of six traits observed two main axes of variation: (1) size variation at the organ and plant level and (2) leaf economics balancing leaf persistence against plant growth potential.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArticle Synopsis
- The study explores global predictions of plant community traits to better understand their responses to environmental changes, focusing on assessing the reliability of these predictions.
- Utilizing an ensemble modeling approach, researchers predicted plant traits like height and leaf area using locally sourced data while evaluating model accuracy and ecological realism.
- Results showed that while some traits could be reliably predicted with high data quality, leaf nitrogen concentrations were less reliable; the ensemble method outperformed individual models, especially in regions like African deserts and the Arctic.
Plant-pollinator interactions are often highly specialised, which may be a consequence of co-evolution. Yet when plants and pollinators co-evolve, it is not clear if this will also result in frequent cospeciation. Here, we investigate the mutual evolutionary history of South African oil-collecting Rediviva bees and their Diascia host plants, in which the elongated forelegs of female Rediviva have been suggested to coevolve with the oil-producing spurs of their Diascia hosts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMapping local and global variability in plant trait distributions.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A
December 2017
Article Synopsis
- * Traditional methods group plant species into plant functional types (PFTs), averaging their traits, which simplifies the complexities of biodiversity.
- * Using advanced Bayesian modeling and a large global plant trait database, we created detailed maps of plant trait distributions, showcasing how traits vary across the world, highlighting that areas with the most diversity align closely with global PFT averages.