Functional Traits of Forest Plant Communities—Limitations and Potentials
A special issue of Forests (ISSN 1999-4907). This special issue belongs to the section "Forest Biodiversity".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (25 September 2023) | Viewed by 3578
Special Issue Editors
Interests: plant ecology; ecophysiology; biogeography; plant response to climate change; greenhouse gas emission
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In the past 20 years, we have seen a change from a species-based to a trait-based approach in community ecology studies, resulting in an expressive increase in the number of papers on plant functional traits. A functional trait is any measurable characteristic which strongly influences organismal performance (i.e. growth, survival, reproduction). Although considerable progress has been made in understanding plant functioning in forests, there are still gaps to step up this knowledge to the multidimensional trait space, and to less costly and time-consuming methods, for example. Increasing this knowledge is essential to better understand current ecological patterns and to predict future outcomes from vegetation communities in a changing world. Our aim for this Special Issue is to bring together efforts that improve the understanding of forest communities at a functional level. We call for papers that address this knowledge through discussing the gaps and limitations in the field; original reviews on the current ‘status’ of forest communities’ functional traits; and novel experimental designs, databases and methods which could be used to explore other perspectives, such as geoprocessing approaches.
Dr. Fernanda De Vasconcellos Barros
Dr. Caroline Signori-Müller
Guest Editors
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
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Keywords
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functional diversity
- methods in functional ecology
- forest community
- community weighted mean
- morphological and physiological traits
- trait variability
- forest traits database
- traits co-variation
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