Source:Nature Communications

Published:10 July 2025

Abstact:Stomata with various morphologies exhibit distinct capacities among different plants in regulating leaf carbon acquisition and water transpiration during gas-exchange control1. A recent study by Liu et al.2 on the variation of community-weighted stomatal traits across forest and grassland communities has provided valuable insights into plant adaptive strategies in various environments. The study established an unparalleled stomatal characteristic database and pioneered exploring the relationship between these characteristics and the environment at the community level. As we know, plant stomatal traits reflect the plant’s function in gas exchange, water management, and environmental adaptation directly or indirectly. The short-term precision regulation is mainly associated with the speed of stomatal responses, and the long-term potential regulation is associated with stomatal size and density3,4,5. In angiosperms, there are two major types of stomata, each having distinct morphological structures and being associated with a different plant group. Non-grasses have stomata with kidney-shaped guard cells (Fig. 1a, b), and grasses have stomata with dumbbell-shaped guard cells (Fig. 1c, d). There are important functional differences between the stomata types in plants adaptingto various environments. However, in the study by Liu et al.2, community-weighted stomatal traits were calculated without accounting for the different stomatal types in grasses and non-grasses, which may have obscured the correlation between the community-weighted stomatal traits (especially for stomatal length: SL) and the environmental factors, especially in the grassland communities where grasses and non-grasses coexist.