iES_GRdb: Intraspecific plant Economic Spectrum and Growth Rate database

Abstract

Plant functional ecology (PFE) posits that functional traits affect individual fitness indirectly by affecting performance, and that the effects at the individual level scale up to the community and ecosystem levels. It has been a dynamic and fruitful research field in the past three decades. However, over the past decade, critiques of the plant functional ecology framework have grown, pointing to insufficient empirical testing of its foundational assumptions. One major issue is the mismatch between intraspecific and interspecific levels of inference. Many studies assessing trait–performance relationships have done so along environmental gradients—natural or experimental. In such cases, coordinated changes in traits and growth may reflect variation in resource availability rather than differences in resource-use strategy. Moreover, because fitness is environment-dependent, performance components must be linked to traits within a constant environment, not across variable ones. As highlighted by de Bello et al. (2025), the core of trait-based ecology—linking functional traits to fitness—remains incomplete. While fitness is inherently an individual-level property, most trait-based studies compare populations or species, leaving a critical gap in our understanding of individual-level mechanisms.

Within the PFE framework, a set of ‘economic traits’ has been related to resource use strategy at the interspecific level. However, few studies have assessed these patterns at the individual level. This gap of empirical knowledge hinders the integration across organization levels. The present database addresses this gap by providing comprehensive evidence on the relationship between plant economic traits and individual growth rate. It serves two main purposes: (1) To test a fundamental assumption of plant functional ecology—that traits influence fitness via effects on performance (i.e. growth, fecundity, survival). (2) To evaluate the correspondence between trait syndromes and plant strategies at the individual level. This database resulted from a literature survey to identify studies measuring leaf, stem, and root economic traits, and growth rate at the individual level while controlling for growing conditions.

de Bello F, Fischer FM, Puy J, Shipley B, Verdú M, Götzenberger L, ... & Garnier E. 2025. Raunkiæran shortfalls: Challenges and perspectives in trait‐based ecology. Ecological monographs, 95(2): e70018.