Background
Although wetlands are widespread and occupy large areas around the globe, cross-continental scale patterns of plant adaptations to wetland conditions have received little attention. This contrasts to work done on global patterns of plant traits in terrestrial ecosystems. Therefore, our working groups aimed at performing a quantitative global meta-analysis of relationships between plant traits and environmental conditions in wetlands.

Activities
The first successful workshop took place at Network Headquarters, Sydney, 17-21 November 2008. There was a good interaction between ecologists and ecophysiologists. Most time was dedicated to expand and correct a wetland trait database to 5,500 entries, for 1,200 species on habitat characteristics, traits related to adaptations to flooding regimes and traits related to general plant strategies. Some promising initial analyses were carried out.

Next steps
During the workshop, we agreed on the following next steps:
1. We will prepare a manuscript that describes the results for wetland plant traits associated with flooding tolerance (e.g. root porosity, root depth, barrier to radial oxygen loss, convective flows, elongation response, root:shoot ratio). Coming months, gaps in the database will be filled and analyses will be rerun. A manuscript from this analysis is expected to be submitted in autumn 2009.
2. A large unpublished dataset on leaf N and leaf P was compiled during the workshop. Patterns in these plant attributes for wetland plant species were compared to those found for terrestrial species. The initial analyses look very promising, and judgment on a possible publication will be made when the database is complete (April 2009).
3. The wetland trait database is rich in information on traits related to general plant strategies. Preliminary analyses have established that it will be worthwhile to compare wetland plants to non-wetland species. The database will be completed and the analyses re-run. If our expectations based on the preliminary analyses are born-out, a manuscript would likely be prepared by December 2009.

Last Updated December 2008