Understanding how environmental change alters the composition of plant assemblages, and how this in turn affects ecosystem functioning is a major challenge in the face of global climate change. Assuming that values of plant traits express species adaptations to the environment, the trait-based approach is a promising way to achieve this goal. Nevertheless, how functional traits are related to s...

Long-term studies have revealed that the structure and dynamics of many tropical forests are changing, but the causes and consequences of these changes remain debated. To learn more about the forces driving changes within tropical forests, we investigated shifts in tree species composition over the past 25 years within the 50-ha Forest Dynamics Plot on Barro Colorado Island (BCI), Panama, and e...

Located in the central Chinese Loess Plateau, the Jinghe River is one of the major tributaries of the Yellow River, and the river basin it inhabits is characterized by a continental climate. Considering that land degradation has been the main ecological problem in the Jinghe River Basin, there is an urgent need to scientifically explore the land degradation mechanism in order to restore natural...

Whether the fraction of total forest biomass distributed in roots, stems, or leaves varies systematically across geographic gradients remains unknown despite its importance for understanding forest ecology and modeling global carbon cycles. It has been hypothesized that plants should maintain proportionally more biomass in the organ that acquires the most limiting resource. Accordingly, we hypo...

Successful management of forest systems requires a deeper understanding of the role of ecophysiological traits in enabling adaptation to high temperature and water deficit under current and anticipated changes in climate. A key attribute of leaf water relations is the water potential at zero turgor (πtlp), because it defines the operating water potentials over which plants actively control grow...

The upper reaches of the Minjiang River (URMR), located on the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau in southwestern China, are an important component of the ecological barrier of the Upper Yangtze River Basin. Climate change and human activities have increased the ecological sensitivity and vulnerability of the region, which may pose a threat to the ecological security of the Yangtze River Basin...

Late Holocene climate in western North America was punctuated by periods of extended aridity called megadroughts. These droughts have been linked to cool eastern tropical Pacific sea surface temperatures (SSTs). Here, we show both short-term and long-term climate variability over the last 1,500 y from annual band thickness and stable isotope speleothem data. Several megadroughts are evident, in...

Strontium isotope analysis of precisely dated calcite growth layers in Holocene speleothems from Barbados, West Indies, reveals high-resolution temporal variations in ground-water composition and may provide a new approach to documenting the links between climate variability and fluctuations in the hydrologic cycle such as recharge rates and flow paths. The speleothems grew in a cave that devel...

Climate change is altering the water cycle globally, increasing frequency and magnitude of floods droughts. An outstanding question whether biodiversity responses to hydrological disturbance depend on background climatic context – if so, which contexts increase vulnerability disturbance. Answering this requires comparison organismal across environmental gradients. However, opportunities track d...