One of ecology's grand challenges is developing general rules to explain and predict highly
complex systems. Understanding and predicting ecological processes from species' traits …

Costs of defense are central to our understanding of interactions between organisms and
their environment, and defensive phenotypes of plants have long been considered to be …

Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological
characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect …

In the past two decades, a large number of studies have investigated the relationship
between biodiversity and ecosystem functioning, most of which focussed on a limited set of …

Plant traits–the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological
characteristics of plants and their organs–determine how primary producers respond to …

Species comparisons are a cornerstone of biology and there is a long tradition of using the
comparative framework to study the ecology and evolution of plant defensive traits. Early …

In recent years the focus in ecology has shifted from species to a greater emphasis on
functional traits. In tandem with this shift, a number of trait databases have been developed …

Lignin is a plant component with important implications for various agricultural disciplines. It
confers rigidity to cell walls, and is therefore associated with tolerance to abiotic and biotic …

The dazzling variation in plant chemistry is a primary mediator of trophic interactions,
including herbivory, predation, parasitism, and disease. At the same time, such interactions …

Biodiversity is threatened by climate change and other human activities [1], but to assess
impacts, we also need to identify the current distribution of species on Earth. Predicting …