TOLERANCE TO SHADE, DROUGHT, AND WATERLOGGING OF TEMPERATE NORTHERN HEMISPHERE TREES AND SHRUBS

Lack of information on ecological characteristics of species across different continents hinders development of general world-scale quantitative vegetation dynamic models. We constructed common scales of shade, drought, and waterlogging tolerance for 806 North American, European/West Asian, and East Asian temperate shrubs and trees representing about 40% of the extant natural Northern Hemisphere species pool. These scales were used to test the hypotheses that shade tolerance is negatively related to drought and waterlogging tolerances, and that these correlations vary among continents and plant functional types. We observed significant negative correlations among shade and drought tolerance rankings for all…