Data from: Phylogenetic history of vascular plant metabolism revealed using a macroevolutionary common garden

<b>Abstract</b><br/><div>While the fundamental biophysics of C3 photosynthesis is highly conserved across plants, substantial variation in leaf structure and enzymatic activity translates into variability in rates of photosynthesis. Although this variation is well-documented, it remains poorly understood how photosynthetic rates evolve over short and long time scales, and whether these macroevolutionary changes are related to the evolution of key morphological and biochemical leaf traits. Large-scale comparative studies have been hampered by the substantial logistical and statistical challenges in disentangling evolutionary adaptation from environmental acclimation. Here we get around this limitation with a ‘macroevolutionary common garden’ approach in which we measured the metabolic traits J<sub>max</sub> and V<sub>cmax</sub> from 111 phylogenetically diverse species in a shared environment. Using several phylogenetic comparative methods, we find substantial phylogenetic signal in these traits at shallow phylogenetic scales, but  this signal dissipates quickly at deeper time scales. Leaf morphological traits exhibit phylogenetic signal over much deeper time scales, suggesting that these traits are less evolutionarily constrained than metabolic traits. Furthermore, we find that while morphological and biochemical traits (LMA, N<sub>area</sub> and C<sub>area</sub>) are weakly predictive of J<sub>max</sub> and V<sub>cmax</sub>, evolutionary changes in these traits are mostly decoupled from changes in metabolic traits. This lack of tight evolutionary coupling implies that it may not be possible to use changes in these functional traits in response to global change to infer that photosynthetic strategy is also evolving.</div>