Anthropogenic climate change, particularly changes in temperature and precipitation, affects plants in multiple ways. Because plants respond dynamically to stress and acclimate to changes in growing conditions, diagnosing quantitative plant‐environment relationships is a major challenge. One approach to this problem is to quantify leaf responses using spectral reflectance, which provides rapid, inexpensive, and nondestructive...

Greater tree diversity often increases forest productivity by increasing the fraction of light captured and the effectiveness of light use at the community scale. However, light may shape forest function not only as a source of energy or a cause of stress but also as a context cue: Plant photoreceptors can detect specific wavelengths of light, and plants use this information to assess their neighborhoods and adjust their patte...

Stomata control plant water loss and photosynthetic carbon gain. Developing more generalized and accurate stomatal models is essential for earth system models and predicting responses under novel environmental conditions associated with global change. Plant optimality theories offer one promising approach, but most such theories assume that stomatal conductance maximizes photosynthetic net carbon assimilation subject to some c...

Grassland and other herbaceous communities cover significant portions of Earth's terrestrial surface and provide many critical services, such as carbon sequestration, wildlife habitat, and food production. Forecasts of global change impacts on these services will require predictive tools, such as process‐based dynamic vegetation models. Yet, model representation of herbaceous communities and ecosystems lags substantially behin...

Species assemblages often have a non‐random nested organization, which in vertebrate scavenger (carrion‐consuming) assemblages is thought to be driven by facilitation in competitive environments. However, not all scavenger species play the same role in maintaining assemblage structure, as some species are obligate scavengers (i.e., vultures) and others are facultative, scavenging opportunistically. We used a database with 177...

Diverse plant communities are often more productive than mono‐specific ones. Several possible mechanisms underlie this phenomenon but their relative importance remains unknown. Here we investigated whether light interception alone or in combination with light use efficiency (LUE) of dominant and subordinate species explained greater productivity of mixtures relative to monocultures (i.e. overyielding) in 108 young experimental...

Aim Plant trait databases often contain traits that are correlated, but for whom direct (undirected statistical dependency) and indirect (mediated by other traits) connections may be confounded. The confounding of correlation and connection hinders our understanding of plant strategies, and how these vary among growth forms and climate zones. We identified the direct and indirect connections across plant traits relevant to com...

Understanding the distribution of biodiversity across the Earth is one of the most challenging questions in biology. Much research has been directed at explaining the species latitudinal pattern showing that communities are richer in tropical areas; however, despite decades of research, a general consensus has not yet emerged. In addition, global biodiversity patterns are being rapidly altered by human activities. Here, we aim...