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.