Tree cover varies enormously across tropical ecosystems—from arid savannas to closed rain forests—and yet a general predictive theory of tropical tree cover remains elusive. Here we use the maximum‐entropy method to predict the most likely sample frequency distribution of ecosystems with different tree and grass fractional cover if balance between water supply and demand were the dominant constraint on community assembly. Assu...

Summary Based on short‐term experiments, many plant growth models – including those used in global change research – assume that an increase in temperature stimulates plant respiration ( R ) more than photosynthesis ( P ), leading to an increase in the R / P ratio. Longer‐term experiments, however, have demonstrated that R / P is relatively insensitive to growth temperature. We show that both types of temperature response may...