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).