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Zusammenfassung:
Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait combinations depend on trade-offs representing
different ecological strategies, but at the community level trait combinations are expected to be decoupled from these
trade-offs because different strategies can facilitate co-existence within communities. A key question is to what extent community-
level trait composition is globally filtered and how well it is related to global versus local environmental drivers. Here, we
perform a global, plot-level analysis of trait–environment relationships, using a database with more than 1.1 million vegetation
plots and 26,632 plant species with trait information. Although we found a strong filtering of 17 functional traits, similar climate
and soil conditions support communities differing greatly in mean trait values. The two main community trait axes that capture
half of the global trait variation (plant stature and resource acquisitiveness) reflect the trade-offs at the species level but are
weakly associated with climate and soil conditions at the global scale. Similarly, within-plot trait variation does not vary systematically
with macro-environment. Our results indicate that, at fine spatial grain, macro-environmental drivers are much less
important for functional trait composition than has been assumed from floristic analyses restricted to co-occurrence in large
grid cells. Instead, trait combinations seem to be predominantly filtered by local-scale factors such as disturbance, fine-scale
soil conditions, niche partitioning and biotic interactions.
