A (multi)functional island biogeographic approach to capture plant persistence strategies

To successfully persist in a given spot, plants have to exert a variety of functions both above- and belowground (e.g. acquire, use, store and share resources, reproduce sexually and/or vegetatively, occupy space, disperse propagules) while facing multiple challenges (e.g. disturbances, resource scarcity). Plants are indeed sessile organisms inhabiting finite-resource environments, and coexisting with individuals of the same and different species. Interestingly, we still lack to routinely implement trait-based approaches that can proxy the multifunctionality of plants. Islands – which enabled to tackle fundamental questions in ecology, evolution, and biogeography – may offer a suitable model also to identify which strategies plants employ to persist in situ, and so possibly offsetting/reducing local extinction risk. This is because islands constitute simplified systems (being spatially confined and temporally isolated) which can facilitate untangling and quantifying the effect of different ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographical drivers on extant biota. In this talk, I will present 1) conceptual frameworks that we have developed to analyze plant persistence strategies, with a special focus on the belowground compartment, 2) key findings spanning from my PhD to the just-completed functional island biogeography project, and 3) future directions I plan to pursue, namely working on serpentine edaphic islands worldwide using a functionally comprehensive trait-based approach.