At field level, their well-known ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen helps reducing energy consumption while making them particularly suitable for low-input systems. Indeed, they are particularly important in human nutrition as sources of proteins, vitamins and minerals that complement a predominantly cereal-based diet 1, 2. Over the past decade, grain legumes used for human consumption – pulses – have been receiving a resurgence of interest to meet agricultural challenges all over the world. Implications for pulses provisioning of services in agroecosystems are discussed. However, we identified ubiquitous plant traits such as leaflet length, days to maturity, seed weight, and leaf nitrogen content, that discriminated agroecosystem properties and allowed us to gather individual species into three clusters, representative of the three strategies highlighted earlier.
Six agroecosystem properties were predicted by different combinations of traits. The distribution of crop species in this functional space reflected ecological adaptive strategies described in wild species, where the size-related axis of variation is separated from variation of leaf morpho-physiological traits.
The covariance space corresponding to agroecosystem properties was structured by three properties: producers, competitors, stress-tolerant species. We show that pulse diversity has been structured both by breeding and by an environmental gradient. Our analytical framework highlights the correlations and combinations of functional traits that best predict values of six agroecosystem properties defined as ecosystem services estimates. We gathered data for 17 functional traits and six agroecosystem properties for 43 pulse species. We used a functional trait-based approach to evaluate how pulse diversity could support food production in agroecosystems constrained by low water and nutrient availability and exposed to high weed pressure. This study aimed at analyzing existing data on cultivated pulse species in the literature to provide a broad and structured description of pulses’ interspecific functional diversity.
Pulses, defined as legumes which produce dry seed used for human consumption, are plants of great agronomic value, at the food system level as much as the field level but their diversity has been largely underused.
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