Leaf mass per area: An investigation into the application of the ubiquitous functional trait from a paleobotanical perspective

Premise

Leaf mass per area (LMA) is a widely used functional trait in both neobotanical and paleobotanical research that provides a window into how plants interact with their environment. Paleobotanists have used site-level measures of LMA as a proxy for climate, biome, deciduousness, and community-scale plant strategy, yet many of these relationships have not been grounded in modern data. In this study, we evaluated LMA from the paleobotanical perspective, seeking to add modern context to paleobotanical interpretations and discover what a combined modern and fossil data set can tell us about how LMA can be best applied toward interpreting plant communities.

Methods

We built a modern data set by pulling plant trait data from the TRY database, and a fossil data set by compiling data from studies that have used the petiole-width proxy for LMA. We then investigated the relationships of species-mean, site-mean, and site-distribution LMA with different climatic, phylogenetic, and physiognomic variables.

Results

We found that LMA distributions are correlated with climate, site taxonomic composition, and deciduousness. However, the relative contributions of these factors are not distinctive, and ultimately, LMA distributions cannot accurately reconstruct the biome or climate of an individual site.

Conclusions

The correlations that make up the leaf economics spectrum are stronger than the correlations between LMA and climate, phylogeny, morphospace, or depositional environment. Fossil LMA should be understood as the culmination of the influences of these variables rather than as a predictor.