Leaf morphological traits show greater responses to changes in climate than leaf physiological traits and gas exchange variables

Adaptation to changing conditions is one of the strategies plants use to survive climate change. Here, we ask whether plants’ leaf morphological and physiological traits/gas exchange variables have changed in response to recent, anthropogenic climate change. We grew seedlings from resurrected historic seeds from ex-situ seed banks and paired modern seeds in a common-garden experiment. Species pairs were collected from regions that had undergone differing levels of climate change using an emerging framework – Climate Contrast Resurrection Ecology, allowing us to hypothesise that regions with greater changes in climate (including temperature, precipitation, climate variability and climatic extremes) there would be greater trait responses in leaf morphology and physiology over time. Our found that in regions where there were greater changes in climate, there were greater changes in average leaf area, leaf margin complexity, leaf thickness and leaf intrinsic water use efficiency. Changes in..., Historic seeds were acquired for 32 species from stored collections in ex-situ seed banks at The Australian PlantBank and the Australian National Botanic Garden. This included four herbaceous species, ten shrubs, seven shrub-trees and eleven trees where all shrubs, shrub-trees and trees were evergreen species (See Everingham et al 2021, Ecology and Dryad dataset https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4f4qrfj83 for more information of seed collection). Matched modern seeds from the same species as the historic seeds were collected in the same location, at the same time of year as their historic counterparts. The amount of time between the historic and modern seed collections ranged from 29 years to 40 years.
Seeds were germinated on water agar (0.7% w.v.) in controlled incubators. Most species were germinated at 20°C with a 12-hour light, 12-hour dark cycle, but some species required specific germination treatments such as gibberellic acid (GA3), smoke water (1%) or specific temperature and light..., Data files can be opened in microsoft excel or any program that can read xlsx files, # Data from: Leaf morphological traits show greater responses to changes in climate than leaf physiological traits and gas exchange variables

These are the data available for the study pertaining to the manuscript Leaf morphological traits show greater responses to changes in climate than leaf physiological traits and gas exchange variables by Everingham et al.

The methods for data collection are available here on Dryad and also in the methods section of the manuscript.

There are four datasets available:

1.Leaf_trait_measurement_data.xlsx: the raw data of all leaf trait measurements in the study
2.Climate_Data.xlsx: the raw data of all climate data used in the study
3.growthform.csv: the raw growth form data of each species in the study
4.LeafDataFullUsedinAnalyses.csv: transformed data from the raw data which is then used in all main analyses in the study

All datasets have a tab for metadata (\"Metadata\") where each variable in each dataframe is explained in detail with units provi...