”Taking a systems approach: defining the agenda for ecological forecasting

DIAZ S

Buckingamshire

Workshop; ”Taking a systems approach: defining the agenda for ecological forecasting”; 2011

Royal Society

Can recurrent patterns of plant specialisation help summarizing ecosystem properties? Professor Sandra Diaz, National University of Córdoba, Argentina Are there recurrent functional trait syndromes underpinning the remarkable variety of living organisms? Can these be linked to the structure and dynamics of ecosystems? Do such links help understanding and predicting the responses of ecosystems - and the societal benefits derived from them - to different environmental drivers? I will address these questions by first presenting an overview of the field of plant functional traits. There is now convincing evidence of the existence of recurrent functional trait syndromes among plants, and new international databases offer the promise to put this to the test at the global scale. I will then link plant functional traits with new conceptual and methodological tools for the study of functional diversity. These tools allow empirical testing of the importance of functional trait composition and variety in determining ecosystem properties and the benefits that people derive from them in different contexts. Finally, I will discuss the potentials and limitations of using these links in predictive ecology.