AI Summary: This paper uses 'spectral network analysis'—a tool usually used in social media or physics—to understand how plants adapt to climate change. By looking at how different plant traits (like leaf size and water usage) are linked together, the researchers found that climate stress makes these networks less flexible.
Plant traits are often studied in isolation, yet they function as coordinated networks to respond to environmental stressors. We apply spectral network analysis to a large-scale dataset of plant traits collected across a steep climate gradient. We find that trait coordination—how traits like leaf mass and water-use efficiency change together—is highly sensitive to temperature and precipitation shifts. Our results show that as climates become more extreme, plant trait networks become more 'modular,' potentially limiting their adaptive plasticity. This work provides a new mathematical framework for predicting how ecosystems will restructure in a warming world.
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