Three eco-physiological strategies of response to drought maintain the form and function of a tropical montane grassland

1. Ecologists seek a general scheme to classify the diversity of plant responses to environmental factors into a few strategies (e.g. competitor -C, stress-tolerant -S, ruderal-R), while plant physiologists seek a mechanistic scheme to explain such different responses (e.g. tolerance, escape, avoidance). So far, few attempts have been made to combine both perspectives into plant eco-physiological strategies. Moreover, the relative contribution of different strategies to maintain both community structure and ecosystem functioning during drought has rarely been assessed. This limits our capacity to predict how extreme events caused by climate change will affect plant communities.

2. Here, we present an integrated framework to identify plant eco-physiological strategies and to estimate their contribution to community originality (diversity of trait-combinations), dominance (species relative frequency), and ecosystem functioning (productivity and evapotranspiration).

3. We applied thi...