title: Consistent role of Quaternary climate change in shaping current plant functional diversity patterns across European plant orders.
abstract: Current and historical environmental conditions are known to determine jointly contemporary species distributions and richness patterns. However, whether historical dynamics in species distributions and richness translate to functional diversity patterns remains, for the most part, unknown. The geographic patterns of plant functional space size (richness) and packing (dispersion) for six widely distributed orders of European angiosperms were estimated using atlas distribution data and trait information. Then the relative importance of late-Quaternary glacial-interglacial climate change and contemporary environmental factors (climate, productivity, and topography) as determinants of functional diversity of evaluated orders was assesed. Functional diversity patterns of all evaluated orders exhibited prominent glacial-interglacial climate change imprints, complementing the influence of contemporary environmental conditions. The importance of Quaternary glacial-interglacial climate change factors was comparable to that of contemporary environmental factors across evaluated orders. Therefore, high long-term paleoclimate variability has imposed consistent supplementary constraints on functional diversity of multiple plant groups, a legacy that may permeate to ecosystem functioning and resilience. These findings suggest that strong near-future anthropogenic climate change may elicit long-term functional disequilibria in plant functional diversity.
authors.affiliation: Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
authors.forename: Alejandro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ordonez
authors.affiliation: Section for Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Department of Bioscience, Aarhus University, Ny Munkegade 114, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
authors.forename: Jens-Christian
authors.initials: JC
authors.lastname: Svenning
mesh_terms: D044822:Biodiversity; D000073559:Caryophyllales / Q000254:growth & development; D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D005060:Europe; D063245:Plant Development / Q000502:physiology*; D011157:Population Dynamics; D019685:Rosales / Q000254:growth & development