Response of Plant Functional Traits to Environments and Their Roles in Ecosystem Processes

Functional traits are defined as a suite of an organism’s morphological, physiological, phenological, or behavioral characteristics that influence fitness via their effects on growth, survival, and/or reproduction. These plant traits are usually divided into response traits, which characterize a plant’s response to environmental change, and effect traits, which describe the effect of a plant on ecosystem functioning. A central tenet of functional ecology is the knowledge that organisms demonstrate characteristics beyond taxonomy in exploring how they respond to environments and affect ecosystem functioning. Theoretically, trait-based approaches explore the organisms' adaptations and interactions with environments and integrate processes across plant organs, species, and ecosystems. For example, the growth-rate hypothesis predicates that a faster-growing plant generally has a lower nitrogen-to-phosphorus ratio and higher tissue phosphorus than slower-growing plants. Additionally, field studies also show that plant traits that promote resource use and resource acquisition efficiency (i.e., low wood density and high specific leaf area) are related to fast growth, whereas trait associated with resource conservation (high wood density and low specific leaf area) are coordinated with high survival rate. Therefore, these trait-based methods have been widely used to connect ecological strategies or organismal functioning to many ecological processes underpinning forest growth across population, community, and ecosystem scales.

There has been a general increase in consensus that plant trait variations are mainly influenced by local-scale factors such as fine-scale soil factors, disturbance regimes, and biotic interactions. However, little is known about how plant trait trade-offs/synergies respond to environmental changes, like climate change or stress gradients. Furthermore, while many studies have shown a strong link between functional traits and ecosystem processes, their relationships remain under-examined or uncertain in many forest environments. Therefore, this Research Topic is dedicated to advancing the study of trait spectra, functional trait variations, or functional diversity related to plant adaptation across environments and their effects on ecosystem processes associated with forest growth.

Well-prepared submissions covering, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome:
(1) Inter- or intra- specific plant trait variations or functional diversity across different growth and development (age) stages, environmental gradients (climate, soil, topographic factors, disturbance regimes), and vegetation zones from temperate, boreal, subtropical, to tropical forests.
(2) Trait spectra, trait dimensionality, and trait trade-offs/synergies among different organs from leaf, branch, and stem to root. For example, mapping plant biogeochemistry traits or nutrient uptake and resorption from different plant organs or different growth and development (age) stages.
(3) The effects of plant traits on ecosystem processes associated with forest growth (such as processes involved in carbon sequestration and nutrient cycling) from individuals, species, populations, and communities to ecosystems, and at different spatial and temporal scales or across different environmental gradients or disturbance regimes.

Keywords: Plant functional trait, Environmental factor, Plant adaptation, Ecosystem process, Ecosystem function, Carbon and nutrient cycling

Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.