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December XX, 2021

Dear Editor,

We hereby submit tha manuscript, “Sources and consequences of mismatch between leaf disc and whole-leaf leaf mass per area (LMA)” (Phisamai Maenpuen, Masatoshi Katabuchi, Yusuke Onoda, Cong Zhou, Jiao-Lin Zhang, Ya-Jun Chen), for consideration as a brief communication article in American Journal of Botany.

What are the questions addressed or hypotheses tested? Using species mean and individual mean leaf mass per area (LMA) from leaf discs and whole-leaves, we examined what extent whole-leaf and leaf disc LMA match, whether the difference are associated with leaf size and thickness, and whether intraspecifc variation for each species match.

What is the major contribution of your paper to your discipline? The current largest plant trait database (TRY) mixes LMA values obtained by different protocol:

  1. LMA from a whole leaf including or excluding petioles, and
  2. LMA from a leaf disc excluding all major veins or petioles. These differences in the measurement methods may lead to large discrepancies in the estimates of LMA values. We determined LMA using both leaf discs and whole-leaf (including petiole) for ~330 woody species from across biomes to demonstrate that mean values of leaf disc LMA are good proxies for mean values of whole-leaf LMA with an appropriate calibration but there are large discrepancy between intraspecific variation determined by leaf disc and whole-leaf. Using an appropriate size of leaf punch was also important for obtaining stable estimates of leaf disc LMA that matches well with whole-leaf LMA, because small leaf disc inflates measurement errors. Our study provides a useful guideline for plant ecologists to measure LMA.

How is this contribution of interest to a broad audience. LMA is the key trait in the leaf economic spectrum, which is one of the most used leaf functional traits in plant ecology. Our study focuses on the measurement method of LMA and its ecological consequences, and thus it targets many of plant ecologists.

The programming code and the data supporting the findings of this study will be deposited at Zenodo (https://zenodo.org).

Sincerely,

Phisamai Maenpuen, Masatoshi Katabuchi, Yusuke Onoda, Cong Zhou, Jiao-Lin Zhang, and Ya-Jun Chen

Corresponding author and contact information:

Key Laboratory of Tropical Forest Ecology, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Mengla, Yunnan 666303, China

Tel.: +86-691-8713195; Fax: +86-691-8715070

Email: [email protected]