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.