Lonely plants in arid land are functionally hyperdiverse

Abstract

In Gross et al.1 we produced the largest ever standardized dryland plant trait database including 133,769 trait measurements from 301 perennial plant species surveyed across 326 plots and six continents. Our findings indicate that arid and hyper-arid drylands act as a global reservoir of plant phenotypic diversity, challenging the common assumption that harsh environmental conditions reduce plant trait diversity. Tordoni et al.2 speculate that the larger phenotypic diversity in harsh environments found in our study is overestimated and misinterpreted. The re-analyses presented here further confirm that the patterns we originally reported are robust, and thus that the concerns from Tordoni et al. are not well-founded and do not apply to our study. We stand for the main conclusions of our study and maintain that lonely plants in arid land are functionally hyperdiverse.