Abstract Despite the importance of flowers to plant fitness, it remains unclear whether flowers display ecophysiological strategies and how floral traits are associated with leaf economic traits. Using a comparative analysis of flowers and leaves, we evaluated associations between seven homologous traits related to carbon and water economics in 245 plant species sampled at four locations spanning more than 100 degrees of latitude: Arctic tundra, tropical campos rupestres , Patagonian steppe and a botanical garden in the Mediterranean‐type climate of California. We used correlation analysis, standard major axes, principal component analysis and trait networks to evaluate the associations among flower and leaf traits. We found flower trait combinations ranging from large‐sized flowers with thick petals and lengthy water turnover times ( τ ) to small‐sized flowers with thin petaloid structures and high residual conductance ( g res ). There was positive scaling among flower and leaf traits such as g res , τ , petal and leaf thickness, and area. Network analysis showed no modular structure of flower and leaf traits when all species were evaluated together. Our results showcase that flower phenotypes are distributed along a continuum of trait variation and are functionally linked to leaves through water‐ and size‐related traits. This cross‐organ correlation indicates that habitat filtering based on the ecophysiological strategies of one organ would influence the phenotypes of the other organ. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.
Paiva et al. (Tue,) studied this question.