DISCUSSION
Overall, we found support for our fundamental expectation: soil properties and insularity exerted the most prevalent effects on persistence-related trait patterns. Plants under harsher environmental conditions and in more insular settings were distinguished by resource-conservative strategies. Yet, environmental and insularity predictors generally explained low portions of variability in the models, which was instead mostly related to species identity (Table 2). This finding clearly indicates that strategies deployed to persistin-situ vary across plant species. This inference was reinforced by the high proportion of variance explained (up to 87%) in the single trait-single predictor models at the intraspecific level (Table 3, 4). However, the consistency of trait responses to soil, climate and insularity differed greatly between clonal and non-clonal species. Clonal species tended to show similar trait patterns with overlapping species’ non-acquisitive persistence niches, while non-clonal species displayed species-specific trait responses and distinct functional niche occupancies (Figure 2).