Bianca A Santini, John G Hodgson, Ken Thompson, Peter J Wilson, Stuart R Band, Glynis Jones, Mike Charles, Amy Bogaard, Carol Palmer & Mark Rees

The relationships between plant traits tells us about the amount of resources species invest on a given trait. For example, thicker leaves are long-lived, but their construction is expensive for the plant and have lower photosynthetic rates than thin leaves. Another example, related to our study, is the triangular relationship found between seed mass and leaf area in woody species. This relationship tells us that small-seeded species can have either small or large leaves, whereas big-seeded species have large leaves. However, the combination of big seeds with small leaves does not occur. Again, this give us insights into resource allocation, in this case of the photosythates in a leaf and how are they distributed, either into small seeds or big seeds.

Indeed, resource allocation changes…