Julie Messier

University of Waterloo | UWaterloo · Department of Biology

Phenotypic traits influence species distributions, but ecology lacks established links between multidimensional phenotypes and fitness for predicting species responses to environmental change. The common focus on single traits rather than multiple trait combinations limits our understanding of their adaptive value, and intraspecific trait covariati...

Niche differentiation arising in functional trait diversity is expected to increase the potential for species coexistence, but empirical evidence for these relationships is sparse. We test whether grazing increases the functional diversity of leaf traits and niche differentiation in phosphorus limited Tibetan alpine meadows. We measured five traits...

Despite being recognized as a promoter of diversity and a condition for local coexistence decades ago, the importance of intraspecific variance has been neglected over time in community ecology. Recently, there has been a new emphasis on intraspecific variability. Indeed, recent developments in trait-based community ecology have underlined the need...

Ecology Letters (2010) 13: 838–848 Despite the increasing importance of functional traits for the study of plant ecology, we do not know how variation in a given trait changes across ecological scales, which prevents us from assessing potential scale-dependent aspects of trait variation. To address this deficiency, we partitioned the variance in tw...

Estimating phenotypic distributions of populations and communities is central to many questions in ecology and evolution. These distributions can be characterized by their moments (mean, variance, skewness and kurtosis) or diversity metrics (e.g. functional richness). Typically, such moments and metrics are calculated using community‐weighted appro...

Here we provide the ‘Global Spectrum of Plant Form and Function Dataset’, containing species mean values for six vascular plant traits. Together, these traits –plant height, stem specific density, leaf area, leaf mass per area, leaf nitrogen content per dry mass, and diaspore (seed or spore) mass – define the primary axes of variation in plant form...

Estimating the distribution of phenotypes in populations and communities is central to many questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. These distributions can be characterized by their moments: the mean, variance, skewness, and kurtosis. Typically, these moments are calculated using a community-weighted approach (e.g. community-weighted mean) w...

Historic yield advances in the major crops have to a large part been achieved by selection for improved productivity of groups of plant individuals such as high-density stands. Research suggests that such improved group productivity depends on “cooperative” traits (e.g. erect leaves, short stems) that – while beneficial to the group – decrease indi...

Technologies for crop breeding have become increasingly sophisticated, yet it remains unclear whether these advances are sufficient to meet future demands. A major challenge with current crop selection regimes is that they are often based on individual performance. This tends to select for plants with “selfish” traits, which leads to a yield loss w...

Predicting biotic responses to environmental change requires understanding the joint effects of abiotic conditions and biotic interactions on community dynamics. One major challenge is to separate the potentially confounding effects of abiotic environmental variation and local biotic interactions on individual performance. The stress gradient hypot...

Plant communities have undergone dramatic changes in recent centuries, although not all such changes fit with the dominant biodiversity-crisis narrative used to describe them. At the global scale, future declines in plant species diversity are highly likely given habitat conversion in the tropics, although few extinctions have been documented for t...

1. Plant phenotypic diversity is shaped by the interplay of trade-offs and constraints in evolution. Closely integrated groups of traits (i.e. trait dimensions) are used to classify plant phenotypic diversity into plant strategies, but we do not know the degree of interdependence among trait dimensions. To assess how selection has shaped the phenot...

Trait-based approaches have an increasingly dominant role in community ecology. Although trait-based strategy dimensions such as the leaf economic spectrum (LES) have been identified primarily at global-scales, trait variation at the community scale is often interpreted in this context. Here we argue from several lines of evidence that a research p...

Niche differentiation arising in functional trait diversity is expected to increase the potential for species coexistence, but empirical evidence for these relationships is sparse. We test whether grazing increases the functional diversity of leaf traits and niche differentiation in phosphorus limited Tibetan alpine meadows. We measured five traits...

Recent studies have shown that accounting for intraspecific trait variation (ITV) may better address major questions in community ecology. However, a general picture of the relative extent of ITV compared to interspecific trait variation in plant communities is still missing. Here, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relative extent of ITV within a...

Background/Question/Methods Comparing the relative amount of variance found at different ecological scales is informative of the relative importance of drivers of trait variation acting at those scales. In a recent study by Messier et al. (2010) two central traits of the leaf economic spectrum, Leaf Mass per Area and Leaf Dry Matter Content, have...

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Plant traits – the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants and their organs – determine how primary producers respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, influence ecosystem processes and services and provide a link from species richness to ecosystem functional diversity. T...

Background/Question/Methods Plant functional traits are properties that determine the adaptations to and fitness of plants in different environments. Understanding how and why they vary is essential because functional traits are the fundamental basis of biodiversity; they draw a concrete and descriptive portrait of species and of the way they rela...

Functional traits, measurements of adaptive aspects of the phenotype, are increasingly used for the study of plant community ecology. Despite their importance, we do not know which ecological scales contain the most variation in a given trait, which hampers assessment of the wider relevance of findings from studies conducted at only one scale. To a...

Canopy gaps play an important role in the dynamics of old-growth forests, although it is not well known how gap dynamics differ among regions. To further our understanding of natural gap dynamics in mixedwood forests, this study compares mixed stands located in eastern (Gaspésie region) and western (Témiscamingue region) Quebec. We tested whether t...