Conclusion
Habitat loss altered the effects of macroclimate on community assembly,
calling attention to the scale-dependence of trait-mediated composition
in human-modified landscapes. Relatively weak ability of individual
traits to predict abundance and opposing axes of trait-mediated assembly
suggest the need to examine trait-coordination for multiple stressors
(Craine et al., 2012; Shen et al., 2019). Moreover, ‘soft’ traits
measured here clearly do not provide sufficient insights into
community-level responses to climate gradients (Li et al., 2015; Shipley
et al., 2016). Measuring a wider suite of traits relevant to different
stressors will help capture the full spectrum of functions that govern
compositional change in human-modified forests (Maréchaux et al., 2019;
Medeiros et al., 2019; Shipley et al., 2016). For example, no studies
have yet correlated hydraulic traits to species performance in the
warmer, drier microclimates near fragment edges. Shifts in the success
of phenotypes with habitat loss could be due to edge effects that alter
forest microclimates (Arroyo-Rodríguez et al., 2017; Davis et al.,
2019): e.g., warmer, drier conditions near edges may amplify water
stress during the dry season (Ewers and Banks-Leite, 2013). Examining
how microclimate mediates the impacts of macroclimate on species
performance would help predict compositional change in human-modified
landscapes subject to a changing climate (De Frenne et al., 2019;
Zellweger et al., 2020). Hierarchical, scale-dependent insights into
trait-environment linkages will allow evidence-based restoration
planning to achieve different targets such as community structure,
diversity or ecosystem functioning (Laughlin, 2014; Laughlin et al.,
2017).