Plant trait‐environment relationships in tundra are consistent across spatial scales

Abstract

Patterns and processes shaping ecosystems vary across spatiotemporal scales. As plant functional traits reflect ecosystem properties, investigating their relationships with environment provides an important tool to understand and predict ecosystem structure and functioning. This is particularly important in the tundra where a changing climate may trigger severe alterations in plant communities as both summer and winter conditions are changing. Here, we investigate the relationships between key environmental drivers including summer temperature, snow persistence, topographic position and soil pH, and species height, specific leaf area (SLA) and seed mass as plant traits. The study is carried out at three spatial extents in the arctic–alpine region of Fennoscandia, modelling the trait-environment relationships at each scale to investigate whether the relationships are scale dependent. Our results show that summer temperature and snow persistence are the most important variables explaining community trait composition. Temperature is important especially to vegetation height, which increased towards higher temperatures, whereas seed mass and SLA are related to snow persistence. Seed mass decreased towards longer snow persistence, while SLA responded in scale-dependent ways. Topographic position and soil pH affect community trait composition moderately. Overall, our study demonstrates that trait-environment relationships in the tundra are largely consistent across spatial scales. Our findings highlight the ecological relevance of snow for all three functional traits regardless of scale, showing that snow information could be particularly important to better understand large-scale trends in plant community composition and ecosystem functioning as seasonal snow cover is shrinking globally.