Conclusions
Grapevines are among the world’s most commercially important crops,
currently covering over 7.1 million ha of land in 2017 (Aryal &
Anderson, 2013). Understanding how grapevine physiology responds to
global environmental change drivers is therefore a critical avenue of
research with implications for agricultural sustainability, as well as
understanding how domestication has influenced the functional traits and
trait relationships of crops. Our results contribute to both of these
areas of research, but considerable opportunities remain. First, we show
greater compaction leads to grapes expressing more resource-conservative
trait syndromes. Extending this work to evaluate if leaf trait values
along an intra-genotype LES Chardonnay are correlated with grape growth,
yield, and quality, can aid in refining predictions of grapevine and
vineyard responses to environmental conditions, at local- through to
global scales (Morales-Castilla et al., 2020). Second, there remain
surprisingly few analyses evaluating how multiple grape varieties differ
in their LES traits (Greer, 2017). Expanding our study to multiple grape
varieties presents an opportunity to test hypotheses on whether or not
LES trait relationships in multiple grape varieties are constrained
along a single intra-specific LES, or if different varieties express
unique LES trait relationships. These lines of research, as informed by
our findings here, present novel opportunities to explore how
domestication histories influence crop ecophysiological strategies and
responses to environmental change.