The Grand Challenges in Functional Plant Ecology

The science, this section-journal of Frontiers in Plant Sciences will be covering at great breadth and depth, aims at linking plant responses with the environment. The environmental influences are manifold and include both abiotic and biotic ones. The first include physical and chemical influences, the latter include plant–plant, plant–animal, plant–microbe (incl. virus) interactions. The plant responses considered go from gene to ecosystem scale. Building upon more than a century of functional plant ecology, any attempt at sketching the challenges ahead is inevitably rather subjective, reflecting personal experience, and expertise. Plant ecology covers both, basic science and oriented (applied) science, the latter under strong influence of the ongoing attempts at understanding impacts of environmental changes, particularly those, commonly subsumed under “global change.” The current wave of global change research often tends to lack sound foundation in theory, because functional plant ecology is a relatively young science and the applied questions came up before many of the more basic queries had been answered. On the other hand, the great motivation associated with global change research, will exert a new momentum in exploring the underlying principles of plant responses to the environment. In three sections, I will try to reflect on how this field of science developed, and from there, will distil a few tasks that I would rank as grand challenges. Several references were chosen to emphasize that the insights are rather classics, but their appreciation has not become common sense.