The authors investigate the broad-scale climatological and soil properties that co-vary with major axes of plant functional traits. They find that variation in plant size is attributed to latitudinal gradients in water or ...

Environmental filtering and dispersal limitation can both maintain diversity in plant communities by aggregating conspecifics, but parsing the contribution of each process to community assembly has proven difficult ...

Recent work has shown that evaluating functional trait distinctiveness, the average trait distance of a species to other species in a community offers promising insights into biodiversity dynamics and ecosystem functioning. ...

It is debated whether species-level differences in ecological strategy, which play a key role in much of coexistence theory, are important in structuring highly diverse communities. We examined the co-occurrence patterns ...

As Earth’s climate has varied strongly through geological time, studying the impacts of past climate change on biodiversity helps to understand the risks from future climate change. However, it remains unclear how paleoclimate ...

Disentangling the mechanisms that shape community assembly across diversity gradients is a central matter in ecology. While many studies have explored community assembly through species average trait values, there is a ...

P>Paleobotanists have long used models based on leaf size and shape to reconstruct paleoclimate. However, most models incorporate a single variable or use traits that are not physiologically or functionally linked to ...

Abiotic constraints and biotic interactions act simultaneously to shape communities. However, these community assembly mechanisms are often studied independently, which can limit understanding of how they interact to affect ...