Data from: Are trait-growth models transferable? Predicting multi-species growth trajectories between ecosystems using plant functional traits

Plant functional traits are increasingly used to generalize across
species, however few examples exist of predictions from trait-based models
being evaluated in new species or new places. Can we use functional traits
to predict growth of unknown species in different areas? We used three
independently collected datasets, each containing data on heights of
individuals from non-resprouting species over a chronosquence of
time-since-fire sites from three ecosystems in south-eastern Australia. We
examined the influence of specific leaf area, woody density, seed size and
leaf nitrogen content on three aspects of plant growth; maximum relative
growth rate, age at maximum growth and asymptotic height. We tested our
capacity to perform out-of-sample prediction of growth trajectories
between ecosystems using species functional traits. We found strong
trait-growth relationships in one of the datasets; whereby species with
low SLA achieved the greatest asymptotic heights, species with high
leaf-nitrogen content achieved relatively fast growth rates, and species
with low seed mass reached their time of maximum growth early. However
these same growth-trait relationships did not hold across the two other
datasets, making accurate prediction from one dataset to another
unachievable. We believe there is evidence to suggest that growth
trajectories themselves may be fundamentally different between ecosystems
and that trait-height-growth relationships may change over environmental
gradients.