Author Spotlight: Leaf Trait Analysis for Climate and Ecology Reconstruction in Modern and Ancient Plant Communities

Our research is focused on understanding the relationship between plant traits and climate and ecology in modern plants. Then using these relationships, we can develop proxies or models that we can use to reconstruct climate and ecology in ancient plant communities. Recent research has focused on understanding the biological, physiological, evolutionary underpinnings of the relationship between plant traits and climate and ecology, today and in the past.

This research has shown that plant traits respond to climate and ecology, both in the lifetime of a single plant and in evolutionary time scales. Our research has demonstrated that despite the complex factors that influence plant traits, there are very strong empirical relationships between leaf traits and climate and ecology. We’ve used these relationships to develop models for reconstructing climate and ecology that have been applied in a variety of settings through Earth history.

These methods refine the reconstruction of paleoclimate and paleoecology to provide a much more comprehensive understanding of terrestrial ecosystems and climate than is available by just studying our modern Earth. Such a perspective is critical in understanding what our future Earth holds as climates and ecosystems respond to anthropogenic impact. This is a leaf-physionomy-based approach, meaning that it does not require an accurate taxonomic identification.

In addition, DiLP uses digital measurements of continuous leaf characters as opposed to qualitative and categorical, which allows for greater reproducibility, and these leaf characters have a functional relationship to climate.