The contribution of plant life and growth forms to global gradients of vascular plant diversity

Plant life and growth forms (shortened to ‘plant forms’) represent key functional strategies of plants in relation to their environment and provide important insights into the ecological constraints acting on the distribution of biodiversity. Despite their functional importance, how the spectra of plant forms contribute to global gradients of plant diversity is unresolved.

Using a novel dataset comprising > 295 000 species, we quantify the contribution of different plant forms to global gradients of vascular plant diversity. Furthermore, we establish how plant form distributions in different biogeographical regions are associated with contemporary and paleoclimate conditions, environmental heterogeneity and phylogeny.

We find a major shift in representation of woody perennials in tropical latitudes to herb‐dominated floras in temperate and boreal regions, following a sharp latitudinal gradient in plant form diversity from the tropics to the poles. We also find significant functional differences between regions, mirroring life and growth form responses to environmental conditions, which is mostly explained by contemporary climate (18–87%), and phylogeny (6–62%), with paleoclimate and heterogeneity playing a lesser role (< 23%).

This research highlights variation in the importance of different plant forms to diversity gradients world‐wide, shedding light on the ecological and evolutionary pressures constraining plant–trait distributions.