Learning from dynamic traits: Seasonal shifts yield insights into ecophysiological tradeoffs across scales from macroevolutionary to intra-individual

Premise of research. Phylogenetic comparative methods provide a powerful approach for exploring the macroevolution of plant functional traits. Such approaches can uncover trait-trait correlations through evolutionary time as well as provide evidence of the role of traits in adaptation across environmental gradients. For continuous traits, most phylogenetic comparative approaches to date employ a single trait value per species—often a mean of sampled individuals—or alternatively incorporate intraspecific variation as a distribution around such a mean. It has been known for quite some time that many of the most physiologically and ecologically important plant traits are actually highly plastic, changing dynamically across a growing season, with whole-plant development or in response to environmental conditions. Here we demonstrate one possible approach to assessing the evolution of such dynamic traits: the use of function-valued phylogenetic comparative methods.Methodology. Leaf traits were sampled across 2...