The importance of functional traits and phenotypic plasticity to the functioning of forests

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My long-term objective is to identify the mechanisms through which diversity affects forest ecosystems, their function, and the services they provide. My focus is on the roles that plasticity, scale, and trophic levels play in shifting plant interactions from competition to facilitation. Over the next five years, it is my intention to further the fields of biodiversity - ecosystem functioning and plant functional ecology through:******A. determining the role of functional traits in assembly rules and the distribution of tree species in the world's forests ***B. understanding the importance of phenotypic plasticity in biodiversity effects on forest functioning***C. building a model of forest dynamics that accounts for diversity effects, plasticity and stand development******The funds now available to me only cover the more applied and technical aspects of my research program. The requested DG funds are necessary if I am going to be successful at isolating the key factors explaining diversity effects in forest, as well as to support graduate students. ******I will use a global database of national forest inventory for investigating i) how species and functional traits are distributed globally along environmental gradients, and ii) testing the diversity productivity hypothesis at global scales using a functional approach. To do this I will use a new and comprehensive database of functional traits for the world trees. ******At the experimental scale, I will ask how much of the biodiversity ecosystem functioning effect is due to changes in the values of functional traits of species (phenotypic plasticity) in response to their neighbourhood. This is important because although we know traits are plastic in response to the environment, much less is known in response to neighborhood composition, and how it may affect community level functioning. Existing, carefully designed diversity experiments will be used to test for those mechanisms, including orthogonal gradients of richness and functional diversity. Those will allow for formally testing the hypothesis that phenotypic plasticity drives that relationship, rather than intrinsic differences in traits. I will use drones equipped with multi-spectral cameras, as well as ground measurements (leaf spectral reflectance, fluorescence, and indices related to stress) to measure tree traits and their plasticity. ******Finally, towards the end of this research program I will bring together the accumulating evidence obtained from tree experiments, each often highlighting a single mechanism by which diversity affects forest stand dynamics, to build a more comprehensive model of forest dynamics. ******The impact and applications of this work are in identifying key factors to help manage forests for delivering maximum benefits and sustainability. This research program will also be instrumental in pushing further BEF science in general and forest dynamics in particular.