Plant traits-the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants-determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research sp...
Animals have diversified into a bewildering variety of morphological forms exploiting a complex configuration of trophic niches. Their morphological diversity is widely used as an index of ecosystem function, but the extent to which animal traits predict trophic niches and associated ecological processes is unclear. Here we use the measurements of ...
A global ecological restoration agenda has led to ambitious programs in environmental policy to mitigate declines in biodiversity and ecosystem services. Current restoration programs can incompletely return desired ecosystem service levels, while resilience of restored ecosystems to future threats is unknown. It is therefore essential to advance un...
Published in Ecology letters
Humans require multiple services from ecosystems, but it is largely unknown whether trade-offs between ecosystem functions prevent the realisation of high ecosystem multifunctionality across spatial scales. Here, we combined a comprehensive dataset (28 ecosystem functions measured on 209 forest plots) with a forest inventory dataset (105,316 plots)...
The increasing need to develop a rapid understanding of plant functional dynamics has led to the employment of sensor technology for non-destructive assessment of plants. Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) being an integration of two modalities, imaging and point spectroscopy, is nowadays emerging as a potential tool for rapid, non-destructive and automat...
The Land surface Processes and eXchanges (LPX) model is a fire-enabled dynamic global vegetation model that performs well globally but has problems representing fire regimes and vegetative mix in savannas. Here we focus on improving the fire module. To improve the representation of ignitions, we introduced a reatment of lightning that allows the fr...
Published in Ecology and evolution
Functional trait databases are powerful tools in ecology, though most of them contain large amounts of missing values. The goal of this study was to test the effect of imputation methods on the evaluation of trait values at species level and on the subsequent calculation of functional diversity indices at community level using functional trait data...
Published in Annals of botany
The BMRH described the average response of litter mixtures. The decrease in variance and the convergence to the predicted values based on CWMs was not due to the 'idiosyncratic annulment' of species interactions but was a mathematical consequence of CWMs being sums of random variables. Since convergence occurs with increasing SR and since SR increa...
Aims In eroded lands of the French Southern Alps , burial of early established seedlings under marly sediment weakens the effect of vegetation on soil stabilization and sediment trapping. Therefore , this protective role is largely dependent on species ' resistance to burial , and the understanding of species ' tolerance to this environmental distu...
