UH Hilo biologist: Volcanic island plants may help predict climate change impacts
UH Hilo biologist Jon Price and a team of researchers examined plants in 500 locations on one of the Canary Islands and were surprised to find comparatively high functional diversity.
A geography professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is part of an international research team that collected plant-trait data from the island of Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) to compare against a global data set of plant form and function. Jonathan Price is one of the co-authors of “Assembly of functional diversity in an oceanic island flora,” published in Nature (July 12, 2023).
“Like Hawaiʻi, the Canary Islands represent an isolated volcanic archipelago, with numerous unique endemic species,” notes Price. “The paper involves considering the functional traits of plants on the Island of Tenerife in the context of plants worldwide, and how they evolved in the islands.”
The researchers collected data on eight functional traits for about 80 percent of Tenerife’s native seed flora. They visited more than 500 locations on the island, from 0 to 2,700 meters above sea level, covering all ecosystems. The research team was led by Professor Holger Kreft of the University of Göttingen in Germany.
“Our study shows, for the first time and contrary to all expectations, that species groups that evolved on the Canary Islands do not contribute to the expansion of the breadth of different traits,” says Kreft, who also leads the university’s biodiversity, macroecology and biogeography research group. “This means they do not lead to more functional diversity.”
In a related briefing, the researchers say that understanding the adaptations of plants and their persistence in certain environments, such as those that are arid and isolated, is particularly relevant in the context of anthropogenic (man-made) climate and biodiversity change. Trait-based approaches are crucial to understanding how a species’ functional characteristics interact with its environment and to improving predictions about the impacts of environmental changes on plant diversity and ecosystems.
“At the beginning of our research, we assumed that island plants would show fundamental differences and would be characterized by rather limited diversity in terms of function due to their geographical isolation,” says first author Paola Barajas Barbosa, German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research. “We were all the more surprised to find that the plants of Tenerife have a comparatively high functional diversity.”
Other co-authors include: Dylan Craven, Universidad Mayor, Data Observatory Foundation; Patrick Weigel, University of Göttingen; Pierre Denelle, University of Göttingen; Rüdiger Otto, Universidad de La Laguna; Sandra Díaz, Instituto Multidisciplinario de Biología Vegetal, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas and Facultad de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba; and José María Fernández-Palacios, Universidad de La Laguna.
