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First published online March 20, 2009; doi:10.3732/ajb.0800282 American Journal of Botany 96: 738-750 (2009) © 2009 Botanical Society of America, Inc.

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Ecology of leaf teeth: A multi-site analysis from an Australian subtropical rainforest¹

² Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut 06459 USA ³ Department of Biological Sciences, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109 Australia ⁴ National Herbarium of NSW, Sydney, NSW 2000 Australia ⁵ Department of Geosciences, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802 USA

ABSTRACT

Teeth are conspicuous features of many leaves. The percentage of species in a flora with toothed leaves varies inversely with temperature, but other ecological controls are less known. This gap is critical because leaf teeth may be influenced by water availability and growth potential and because fossil tooth characters are widely used to reconstruct paleoclimate. Here, we test whether ecological attributes related to disturbance, water availability, and growth strategy influence the distribution of toothed species at 227 sites from Australian subtropical rainforest. Both the percentage and abundance of toothed species decline continuously from riparian to ridge-top habitats in our most spatially resolved sample, a result not related to phylogenetic correlation of traits. Riparian lianas are generally untoothed and thus do not contribute to the trend, and there is little association between toothed riparian species and ecological attributes indicating early successional lifestyle and disturbance response. Instead, the pattern is best explained by differences in water availability. Toothed species’ proportional richness declines with proximity to the coast, also a likely effect of water availability because salt stress causes physiological drought. Our study highlights water availability as an important factor impacting the distribution of toothed species across landscapes, with significance for paleoclimate reconstructions.

Key Words: Australia • disturbance • fire • leaf physiognomy • leaf teeth • lianas • life history traits • paleoclimate • rainforest • riparian habitats

Received for publication 18 August 2008. Accepted for publication 11 December 2008.

FOOTNOTES

¹ This research arose from a working group of the ARC-NZ Research Network for Vegetation Function, supported by the Australian Research Council; the authors thank M. Westoby (Macquarie University) for organizing the Network. They also thank C. Allen (Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney) for constructing Fig. 1, R. Gallagher (Macquarie University) for extracting interpolated climate data, and R. Burnham and D. Greenwood for helpful reviews. Work was supported in part by funding from Rainforest Rescue (to R.M.K.) and by grants from the National Science Foundation (grants DEB-0345750 to P.W. and EAR-0742363 to D.L.R.), the David and Lucile Packard Foundation (to P.W.), and the Petroleum Research Fund of the American Chemical Society (grant 40546-AC8, to P.W. and D.L.R.). This paper is dedicated to the memory of Professor Len J. Webb (1920–2008) and his contributions to rainforest botany and ecology. His work valued the role of leaves in understanding the lives of trees and linked paleobotany, neobotany, and ecology in the exploration of evolutionary patterns.

⁶ Author for correspondence (e-mail: droyer{at}wesleyan.edu)

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