Data collection
Using Westoby’s leaf-height-seed (LHS) model of plant functional types (Westoby, 1998), we clustered the plant species studied into four clades: palms, other monocots, dicots, and gymnosperms. We extracted trait data of 2558 palm species 160 genera from a species-level functional trait database of palms, Palm Traits 1.0 (Kissling et al., 2019), complemented with data from published literature (Göldel et al., 2015). Here, we focused on leaf size (maximum blade length in mm), stem height (maximum height in m), and fruit size (maximum fruit width in mm) to represent these major trait axes for palms. We used blade length as a proxy of leaf size of palms because it is commonly used in analyses of leaf traits (Göldel et al., 2015). Fruit size was used as a proxy for seed size because 1) little information of seed size is available for palms, 2) many palm genera are mainly 1-seeded, 3) fruit and seed size are often positively correlated (Fig. S1). Therefore, palms traits we collected are in line with the traits of the LHS plant ecology strategy scheme.
For all species of other monocots, dicots, and gymnosperms, we derived data of leaf size (in mm2), maximum plant height (in m) and seed mass (in mg) from TRY plant trait database (Kattge et al., 2020) and BEIN dataset (Fraser, 2020), complemented it with data from recent publication, representing the leaf–height–seed plant strategy scheme of Westoby (1998). In total, 836 species 279 genera of other monocots, 4290 species 1602 genera of dicots, and 112 species 40 genera of gymnosperms were collected. All data of plant species were averaged at genus level before analysis, which will reduce the effect of environmental scales on plant functional traits.