TRAITS WORKING GROUP

Coordinators: Leonardo Borges (Universidade Federal de São Carlos, Brazil) & Renske Onstein (Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Netherlands & German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, iDiv, Germany)

The field of legume morphology saw significant advances in 2024, with many new papers describing traits and exploring the ecology and evolution of legume morphology (see the Legume Bibliography 2024). In particular, the next volume of the “Advances in Legume Systematics”, to be completed soon (see this year’s Announcements), reflects this trend with more than one third of the accepted papers being morphological studies. However, most of these contributions are by researchers that have not yet joined the Traits Working Group. This highlights opportunities still open to foster collaboration across different research groups.

One interesting contribution from a Traits Working Group member came from Fiona Soper (Marcellus et al. (2024)). Their study found significant diversity in traits related to acquisition of nitrogen and phosphorus and how they differ between nitrogen-fixing and non-fixing legume trees (See more in this year’s Student Digests). The authors are following up on these findings by integrating N-fixation into the root economic spectrum, and also by looking at the relationship between fixation rate and other understudied root traits across tropical tree species. We are very excited about the expansion of studies into the universe of root traits, which are ecologically and certainly evolutionary important, but much less known.

Looking ahead to 2025, we antecipate the publication of the comprehensive database on mimosoid morphology announced in previous reports. We expect this database will be fundamental to advance studies in morphology, ecology and evolution, as well as an stimulus to development of similar projects for other legume clades.

As always, we invite coleagues studying any aspect of legume morphology to join the Traits Working Group by filling the spreadsheet at https://shorturl.at/aqzR1.

References

Marcellus, M., Goud, E.M., Swartz, N., Brown., Soper, F.M. 2024. Evolutionary history and root trait coordination predict nutrient strategy in tropical legume trees. New Phytologist 243: 1711–1723. Doi: 10.1111/nph.19962.