Understanding of variation in plant life history is key to answering evolutionary and ecological questions. Previous work has found that deterministic elasticities to fecundity, survival and growth are key processes that together provide a general pattern to predict life history variation. However, it is not clear whether these deterministic approximations are representative of stochastic behaviour. We apply fully stochastic elasticity analysis to a large, global database of longitudinal studies of plants. We ask i) What are main axes of variation in ternary plots of elasticities? B) Can these axes explain patterns of life history? C) How do results differ between stochastic and deterministic environments?
Results/Conclusions
A trade-off between elasticity to fecundity and survival is the main axis of variation in elasticity space. Life history traits can be explained by this survival-fecundity axis. Specifically, plants that exhibit slow life-history characteristics (long generation times, long life expectances and low reproductive rates) have high survival and low fecundity elasticities, as the position of plant populations move along the axis their life expectancies and generation times decrease and their reproductive rate increases. Finally, comparison between stochastic and deterministic frameworks, find axes of variation and their ability to predict a life history trait remains qualitatively unchanged. However, populations shift in ternary space. The generalisation of deterministic analysis depends on a plants life history.