Leaf drought tolerance cannot be inferred from classic leaf traits in a tropical rainforest

Plants are enormously diverse in their traits and ecological adaptation, even within given ecosystems, such as tropical rainforests. Accounting for this diversity in vegetation models poses serious challenges. Global plant functional trait databases have highlighted general trait correlations across species that have considerably advanced this research program. However, it remains unclear whether trait correlations found globally hold within communities, and whether they extend to drought tolerance traits.
For 134 individual plants spanning a range of sizes and life forms (tree, liana, understory species) within an Amazonian forest, we measured leaf drought tolerance (leaf water potential at turgor loss point, πtlp), together with 17 leaf traits related to various functions, including leaf economics traits and nutrient composition (leaf mass per area, LMA; and concentrations of C, N, P, K, Ca, and Mg per leaf mass and area), leaf area, water use efficiency (carbon isotope ratio), a...