Fast‐risky versus slow‐safe life histories mediate resprouting among Caribbean tropical dry forest trees

Abstract Under climate change, shifting disturbance regimes necessitate understanding the linkages between biomass regeneration and plant function to assess forest resilience. In tropical forests, biomass recovery is driven by two mechanisms: plant recruitment and stem resprouting. While plant recruitment is well‐studied, the physiological and functional basis of resprouting remains underexplored. This study addresses this gap by introducing relative resprout growth rate as a novel metric and evaluating its relationship with physiological strategies, offering insights into how resprouting traits align with functional trade‐offs to improve global biomass recovery models under varying disturbance regimes. Using Caribbean tropical dry forest, where resprouting dominates post‐disturbance regeneration, we investigated the role of the fast‐risky versus slow‐safe continuum in tree resource economics, growth, survival, and resprouting performance. We analysed 10 productivity and hydraulic traits across 44 Puerto Rican tropical dry forest species. Relationships between resource strategies, adult growth, survival and resprouting were analysed cross‐species and with phylogenetic controls to assess evolutionary significance. The fast‐risky vs. slow‐safe continuum emerged as a key trade‐off in this ecosystem. Productivity and drought resistance traits predicted adult tree growth but not survival. Notably, growth positively correlated with vulnerability to hydraulic failure, emphasizing the need to reconsider hydraulic safety margins (HSM) in forests where resprouting mitigates drought‐induced stem loss, complicating traditional assessments of mortality and biomass recovery. Resprouting performance correlated with the fast‐risky/slow‐safe trade‐off, with fast‐growing, drought‐avoiding species exhibiting more vigorous resprouting, highlighting water‐use strategies as crucial for post‐disturbance regeneration. Additionally, the positive association between leaf phosphorus, adult growth and resprouting growth was influenced by shared ancestry, suggesting that traits such as ectomycorrhizal associations and nitrogen fixation, prevalent in nutrient‐poor tropical forests, may underpin this relationship. Based on our findings, we relate the success of resprouts to tree physiological strategies whereby the segregation of productivity and hydraulic traits among species likely dictates differential responses to wind and drought that form the natural disturbance regime in Caribbean tropical dry forest. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.