Leaf economics in a three‐dimensional environment: Testing leaf trait responses in vascular epiphytes to land use, climate, and tree zone

1. The study of functional traits offers predictive power for community ecology. Particularly in cases where individual species are difficult to study, known properties of trait spectra, such as the leaf economics spectrum (LES), and trait-environment relationships can provide crucial generalizable information that can contribute to forecasts of distributional shifts in response to the abiotic effects of climate and land use changes.

2. Vascular epiphytes have been proposed as indicators of environmental change, but we know little about the ecology of most species. Key functional trait assumptions are based on terrestrial plants; testing these in epiphytes verifies their universality and will inform applying functional traits in predicting epiphyte responses to climate and land use change.

3. In this study, we use functional traits from 37 vascular epiphyte species from forests and shade coffee farms at two sites in northern Nicaragua. We compare correlations among traits and intr...