One of ecology's grand challenges is develo** general rules to explain and predict highly
complex systems. Understanding and predicting ecological processes from species' traits …

Biodiversity is defined by trait differences between organisms, and biologists have long
sought to predict associations among ecologically important traits. Why do some traits trade …

The utility of plant functional traits for predictive ecology relies on our ability to interpret trait
variation across multiple taxonomic and ecological scales. Using extensive data sets of trait …

Ecologists seek general explanations for the dramatic variation in species abundances in
space and time. An increasingly popular solution is to predict species distributions …

The search for traits associated with plant invasiveness has yielded contradictory results, in
part because most previous studies have failed to recognize that different traits are important …

By mainly focusing on leaves and roots, functional ecology has been omitting an important
dimension of plant form and function. Horizontal spacers (rooting stems and roots with …

Leaf dry mass per unit area (LMA) is considered to represent the photosynthetic capacity,
which actually implies a hypothesis that foliar water mass (leaf fresh weight minus leaf dry …

Trait‐based approaches have taken an increasingly dominant role in community ecology.
Although trait‐based strategy dimensions such as the leaf economic spectrum (LES) have …

Correlations among plant traits often reflect important trade‐offs or allometric relationships in
biological functions like carbon gain, support, water uptake, and reproduction that are …

Plant phenotypic diversity is shaped by the interplay of trade‐offs and constraints in
evolution. Closely integrated groups of traits (ie trait dimensions) are used to classify plant …