Gene expression is under the control of transcription factors and various epigenomic modifications of the chromatin such as the methylation patterns of the genomic DNA (gDNA) and various chemical changes of histone proteins. Small RNAs are another important regulator of plant chromatin structure and gene expression [1,2]. The integration of different epigenomic marks (i.e. gDNA methylome, histo...

Centennial-scale climate-ecosystem feedbacks are a major source of predictive uncertainty for land-atmosphere fluxes of energy, carbon, and water. Accurate representations of plant functional type (PFT) distributions through time and space are required for modeling centennial-scale feedbacks within Earth system models (ESMs). We tested the ability of ESMs from the Coupled Model Intercomparison ...

The global distribution of vegetation is broadly determined by climate, and where bioclimatic parameters are favorable for several plant functional types (PFTs), by the competition between them. Most current dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) do not, however, explicitly simulate interPFT competition and instead determine the existence and fractional coverage of PFTs based on quasi-equilib...

Ecosystem maps are foundational tools that support multi-disciplinary study design and applications including wildlife habitat assessment, monitoring and Earth-system modeling. Here, we present continuous-field cover maps for tundra plant functional types (PFTs) across ~125,000 km2 of Alaska’s North Slope at 30-m resolution. To develop maps, we collected a field-based training dataset using a p...

Pine wilt disease is a severe threat to the native pine forests in East Asia. Understanding the natural regeneration of the forests disturbed by pine wilt disease is thus critical for the conservation of biodiversity in this realm. We studied the dynamics of composition and structure within different plant functional types (PFTs) in Masson pine forests affected by pine wilt disease (PWD). Based...