Biodiversity science in China has seen rapid growth over recent decades, ranging from
baseline biodiversity studies to understanding the processes behind evolution across …

Traits are measurable features of organisms. Functional traits aspire to more. They quantify
an organism's ecology and, ultimately, predict ecosystem functions based on local …

Forest ecosystems are strongly impacted by continuing climate change and increasing
disturbance activity, but how forest dynamics will respond remains highly uncertain. Here …

Evidence exists that tree mortality is accelerating in some regions of the tropics,, with
profound consequences for the future of the tropical carbon sink and the global …

Trait variability in space and time allows plants to adjust to changing environmental
conditions. However, we know little about how this variability is distributed and coordinated …

Global vegetation and land‐surface models embody interdisciplinary scientific
understanding of the behaviour of plants and ecosystems, and are indispensable to project …

Plants and vegetation play a critical—but largely unpredictable—role in global
environmental changes due to the multitude of contributing processes at widely different …

Generalizing the effect of traits on performance across species may be achievable if traits
explain variation in population fitness. However, testing relationships between traits and vital …

In focusing on how organisms' generalizable functional properties (traits) interact
mechanistically with environments across spatial scales and levels of biological …

Scaling approaches in ecology assume that traits are the main attributes by which
organisms influence ecosystem functioning. However, several recent empirical papers have …