Table 1.
Plant material used in the study and significance of differences between groups of fresh and dried leaves in shape parameters, as well as their area loss and mass loss.
Fig 1.
Scatterplot for results of principal component analysis of elliptic Fourier descriptors.
Small circles indicate position of fresh leaf shape in the PC1–PC2 morphospace, while the lines show the shape change. Individual scatterplots are presented in Fig 2. Patterns of variation along PC1 and PC2 axes are shown on the top and on the left of the plot, by a mean shape and shapes +2 and -2 standard deviation (SD) distant from the mean.
Fig 2.
Shape changes resulted from principal component (PC) analysis of elliptic Fourier descriptors for fresh and dried leaves for each group of analysed plants.
Arrows represent shape changes in the PC1–PC2 space. The starting point indicates shape of a fresh leaf and its head corresponds to its shape after drying. Vector lengths are, in general, not comparable between diagrams, as their scaling is not identical. Leaf silhouettes on the right present mean shapes of fresh leaves.
Fig 3.
Values distribution of sine and cosine of the angles between shape-change vectors and the principal component 1 (PC1)-axis.
Mean values marked with black points. The sin α values correspond to direction of the vector along PC1-axis, while cos α values correspond to its direction along the PC2-axis. All sin α means are positive, which points out that there exists a strong generalised tendency of directional shape change toward lower values of PC1. No general trend has been detected in cos α values, although strong tendencies can be observed for some species.
Fig 4.
Relationship between relative area loss and shape change expressed as vector length.
Mean values for species were used, with 95% confidence of fit.