Abstract
Root exudation is a key trait involved in the plant carbon economy that exerts an important control over ecosystem functioning. Yet, our understanding of global patterns of root exudation and associated influencing factors remains limited. Here we assembled a comprehensive dataset of specific root exudation rate (that is, organic carbon exuded per unit root biomass), root traits and environmental covariates from in situ measurements and a literature synthesis. Our results show that non-woody plants have a higher specific root exudation rate than woody plants. Specific root exudation rate exhibits an increasing trend from high to low latitudes, and soil available phosphorus emerges as the primary influencing factor. We also show that specific root exudation rate primarily falls at the ‘fast’ end of the conservation axis of the root economics space, reflecting a trade-off between carbon allocation to root metabolism and tissue construction. These findings provide a basis for predictive understanding of plant impacts on belowground biogeochemical cycles.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29254439 (ref. 116), and the data sources are listed in Supplementary Tables 1 and 7.
Code availability
The R codes needed to reproduce the results of this study are available via figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29254439 (ref. 116).
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Acknowledgements
We express our gratitude to H. Cornelissen for providing valuable comments on an early version of this paper. We acknowledge the help from the Maoershan Forest Research Station of Northeast Forestry University (J. Gu), the Shennongjia Station of the Chinese Ecosystem Research Network (Z. Xie), and the Taiyanghe Nature Reserve (J. Su and S. Li) for access permission and field support. We are grateful for our laboratory members for carrying out field work (L. Sun, D. Gan, Y. Han, M. Yu and R. Li) and all the scientists who contributed to collecting and sharing the root trait data used in this study.
Funding
This study was financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant nos. 32425038 and 32588202, B.Z.; 32301348, M.H.), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant nos. 2572025BR64 and 2572025JT09, M.H.), the Heilongjiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. YQ2025C016, M.H.) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (grant nos. BX20220003 and 2022M720006, M.H.).
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B.Z. and M.H. conceived of the idea; M.H. performed field experiments and collected literature data; M.H. and F.J. conducted statistical analyses; F.T.d.V., R.D.B., F.J. and B.Z. provided substantial intellectual inputs and contributed to paper developments; M.H. wrote the first draft of the paper, and all authors contributed to subsequent revisions.
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Han, M., de Vries, F.T., Bardgett, R.D. et al. Latitudinal patterns and environmental correlates of plant root exudation.
Nat Ecol Evol (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03103-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03103-4
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