Distribution of functional trait space for the tropical American (left), African (middle) and Asian (right; including Australia) forests separately. a and b show the probabilistic density distribution defined by the PC1 and PC2 space of the 13 plant functional traits used: area, leaf area; C, leaf carbon concentration; Ca, leaf calcium concentration; K, leaf potassium concentration; Mg, leaf magnesium concentration; N, leaf nitrogen concentration; P, leaf phosphorus concentration; DM, leaf dry mass; FM, leaf fresh mass; SLA, specific leaf area; thickness, leaf thickness; WC, leaf water content; WD, wood density (see Extended Data Table 1 for a description of the trait used). The inner colour gradient represents the density of pixels in the PC trait space. Thick contour lines depict the 0.5 and 0.99 quantiles. FRich shows the functional richness and FDiv the functional divergence for the global trait space across continents ( a ) and for tropical American ( b , left), African ( b , middle) and Asian ( b , right) forests.
