Study site and species
All measurements were taken between October 2013 and March 2015 in the paramo “El Verjón-Matarredonda”, located in the Eastern Andean range of Colombia (4° 33’ N, 74° 00’ W), between 3290 and 3400 m.a.s.l. At this site, the mean annual air temperature is 8°C, but daily temperature variation is large, with a maximum of 29.6°C and a minimum of 2.6°C, sometimes in a single day (Leon-Garcia and Lasso, 2019). The annual precipitation ranges between 1000 and 1500 mm yr−1, with a dry season that goes from December through February.
We measured 22 functional traits in 42 species of the most representative and abundant species in the paramo (Table 1 ). Plants were grouped into growth forms following the classification by Ramsay and Oxley (Ramsay and Oxley, 1997): stem rosette, basal rosette, tussock, acaulescent rosette, cushion, upright shrub, prostrate shrub, erect herb, prostrate herb and trailing herb. We have species belonging to seven of these groups; 1) stem rosette with a tall woody stem covered by dead dry leaves with a large apical rosette of live leaves, 2) basal rosette with a large basal rosette of leaves from which a flowering stem eventually arises, 3) acaulescent rosette a small basal rosette of leaves without above ground stems, 4) upright shrubs that includes both tall (> 2 m) and dwarf shrubs with distinctly woody branches with thin bark often with sclerophyllous leaves, 5) prostrate shrubs including all woody creeping dwarf shrubs, 6) erect herbs with erect herbaceous stems often with clustered flowers and 7) prostrate herbs that lack erect stems and possess stolons or other means of spreading vegetatively. We collected samples of the most representative species in our site, which is a mix of grassland/shrubland, where shrubs were the most dominant form in this paramo and therefore their high representation in the data set. We collected all the available species with rosette growth forms at the site.