Revising the Global Biogeography of Annual and Perennial Plants
First published: 2023
Brief summary
Study of global annual/perennial plant life-cycle distributions and how climate and disturbance shape life-cycle strategies.
Article
Annual and perennial growth strategies are distributed unevenly across the world. The study assembled life-history classifications for a large number of plant species and combined them with global occurrence records.
The analysis estimated that annual species make up a smaller proportion of the world's plant species than some earlier assessments suggested. Annual plants were especially associated with environments that are hot and dry during the least favourable part of the year.
Temperature and precipitation during the driest period were stronger predictors of annual-plant occurrence than broad annual climate averages. Climate variability and human disturbance were also associated with a greater representation of annual species.
Projected environmental changes could increase the relative occurrence of annual plants in many ecoregions. Such shifts would change the balance between short-lived and long-lived plant strategies across affected landscapes.
Source details and credits
- Source / publisher: arXiv
- Source type: Preprint
- URL type: WWW
- Credits: arXiv
- URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13101