Global analyses of leaf size suggest that large leaves predominate in favourably warm and wet climates, and small leaves occur at climatic extremes. However, these patterns are dominated by data from angiosperms and may obscure drivers of leaf size variation in older, less speciose groups, such as conifers. Here we employ a novel modelling framework, multi‐response phylogenetic mixed models (MRPMM), that identifies trait corre...

Key message Drought and fire stress acted independently in shaping the evolution of a widespread eucalypt species. Abstract The mixing of local and non-local seed sources (e.g., climate-adjusted provenancing) for revegetating damaged or degraded ecosystems assumes that the non-local genotypes growing in future climates will harbour genetic variation in traits important for maintaining fitness in drier/hotter environments, but...

Main conclusion A gene within a single subclade of NCED genes is triggered in response to both, short- and long-term dehydration treatments, in three model dicot species. Abstract During dehydration, some plants can rapidly synthesise the stress hormone abscisic acid (ABA) in leaves within 20 min, triggering the closure of stomata and limiting further water loss. This response is associated with significant transcriptional upr...

Tropical rainforest woody plants have been thought to have uniformly low resistance to hydraulic failure and to function near the edge of their hydraulic safety margin (HSM), making these ecosystems vulnerable to drought; however, this may not be the case. Using data collected at 30 tropical forest sites for three key traits associated with drought tolerance, we show that site‐level hydraulic diversity of leaf turgor loss poin...

Aim Southern conifers have evolved under different evolutionary pressures compared with northern lineages, but in both regions these plants have undergone extensive extinction and range alteration over the Cenozoic (the last 66 Myr). It is not possible to observe the ecology of fossils directly, but indirect evidence of changes in bioclimatic envelopes can be derived from no‐analogue assemblages (i.e., groups of co‐occurring f...

Drought‐related tree mortality is now a widespread phenomenon predicted to increase in magnitude with climate change. However, the patterns of which species and trees are most vulnerable to drought, and the underlying mechanisms have remained elusive, in part due to the lack of relevant data and difficulty of predicting the location of catastrophic drought years in advance. We used long‐term demographic records and extensive d...

The surge in global efforts to understand the causes and consequences of drought on forest ecosystems has tended to focus on specific impacts such as mortality. We propose an ecoclimatic framework that takes a broader view of the ecological relevance of water deficits, linking elements of exposure and resilience to cumulative impacts on a range of ecosystem processes. This ecoclimatic framework is underpinned by two hypotheses...

Ecology Letters (2011) 14 : 1–8 Abstract Stomatal valves on the leaves of vascular plants not only prevent desiccation but also dynamically regulate water loss to maintain efficient daytime water use. This latter process involves sophisticated active control of stomatal aperture that may be absent from early‐branching plant clades. To test this hypothesis, we compare the stomatal response to light intensity in 13 species of fe...