ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Mapping local and global variability in plant trait distributions.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 57 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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57 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 290 citations in OpenAlex.
- Acquisitive plants exhibit stronger phenological shifts in response to warming: insights from meta-analysis and long-term monitoring.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- Mining buried plant trait data from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF): Comparison and integration with multiple plant trait databases.Applications in plant sciences · 2026Article
- Divergent Temporal Trends in Carbon Assimilation-Growth Coupling Across Global Forests.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Biogeographical variation of angiosperm taxonomic traits exhibits a globally consistent structure.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Global patterns of CThe New phytologist · 2026Article
- Remote Spectral Detection of Canopy Functional Dimensions Varying Within and Across Forest Types.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Bedrock lithology determines forest demographic responses to drought.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Facing a harsh climate: terrestrial plant functional strategies in a changing world.National science review · 2026Article
- Biogeography of community canopy leaf traits and their links to global forest photosynthesis.Science advances · 2026Article
- Widespread controls of precipitation sensitivity on drought recovery of global forests.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Differentiable land model reveals global environmental controls on latent ecological functions.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Leveraging remote sensing and crowd-sourced biodiversity data for enhanced plant functional trait mapping.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Crowdsourced biodiversity monitoring fills gaps in global plant trait mapping.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Exploring the differences in the invasion potential ofPhotosynthetica · 2026Article
- Vegetation biogeography is a main source of uncertainty in modelling the land carbon cycle.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Land use-induced soil carbon loss in the dry tropics nearly offsets gains in northern lands.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Phosphorus constrains global photosynthesis more than nitrogen does.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Inferring scalable productivity-related grassland functional diversity in combination with in-situ leaf spectra and Sentinel-2 data.Fundamental research · 2025Article
- Combining Observations and Models: A Review of the CARDAMOM Framework for Data-Constrained Terrestrial Ecosystem Modeling.Global change biology · 2025Review
- Impacts of leaf traits on vegetation optical properties in Earth system modeling.Nature communications · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
51 authors at 20 institutions in 17 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Our ability to understand and predict the response of ecosystems to a changing environment depends on quantifying vegetation functional diversity. However, representing this diversity at the global scale is challenging. Typically, in Earth system models, characterization of plant diversity has been limited to grouping related species into plant functional types (PFTs), with all trait variation in a PFT collapsed into a single mean value that is applied globally. Using the largest global plant trait database and state of the art Bayesian modeling, we created fine-grained global maps of plant trait distributions that can be applied to Earth system models. Focusing on a set of plant traits closely coupled to photosynthesis and foliar respiration-specific leaf area (SLA) and dry mass-based concentrations of leaf nitrogen ([Formula: see text]) and phosphorus ([Formula: see text]), we characterize how traits vary within and among over 50,000 [Formula: see text]-km cells across the entire vegetated land surface. We do this in several ways-without defining the PFT of each grid cell and using 4 or 14 PFTs; each model's predictions are evaluated against out-of-sample data. This endeavor advances prior trait mapping by generating global maps that preserve variability across scales by using modern Bayesian spatial statistical modeling in combination with a database over three times larger than that in previous analyses. Our maps reveal that the most diverse grid cells possess trait variability close to the range of global PFT means.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.