Biodiversity, a term now widely employed in science, policy, and wider society, has a
burgeoning associated literature. We synthesize aspects of this literature, focusing on …

In the context of a recent massive increase in research on plant root functions and their
impact on the environment, root ecologists currently face many important challenges to keep …

Metacommunity ecology links smaller-scale processes that have been the provenance of
population and community ecology—such as birth-death processes, species interactions …

Earth is home to a remarkable diversity of plant forms and life histories, yet comparatively
few essential trait combinations have proved evolutionarily viable in today's terrestrial …

Under global change, how biological diversity and ecosystem services are maintained in
time is a fundamental question. Ecologists have long argued about multiple mechanisms by …

Plant functional traits directly affect ecosystem functions. At the species level, trait
combinations depend on trade-offs representing different ecological strategies, but at the …

Decline of ecosystem services has triggered numerous studies aiming at developing more
sustainable agricultural management practices. Some agricultural practices may improve …

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

Hutchinson's n‐dimensional hypervolume concept for the interpretation of niches as
geometric shapes has provided a foundation for research across different fields of ecology …

Traits are inherent properties of organisms, but how are they defined for organismal
networks such as mycorrhizal symbioses? Mycorrhizal symbioses are complex and diverse …