New Phytologist is an international journal owned by the New Phytologist Foundation publishing original research in plant science and its applications.

Tropical ecosystems contain the world's largest biodiversity of vascular plants. Yet, our understanding of tropical functional diversity and its contribution to global diversity patterns is constrain...

Nature Reviews Biodiversity, Published online: 11 April 2025; doi:10.1038/s44358-025-00040-1Maintaining human well-being in an era of biodiversity loss requires understanding the role of biodiversity in ecosystem function. We argue that absolute abundance can drive ecosystem function and that this measure should be considered alongside traditional measures of biodiversity.

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We develop a new generalized optimality theory of stomatal conductance that optimizes any non-foliar fitness proxy that requires water and carbon reserves, like growth, survival, and reproduction. We...

Trystan Sanders, Martin Solan, Jasmin A. Godbold This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here. Marine seafloor ecosystems are coming under incre…

In this opinion piece, we explore under which circumstances species traits are expected to explain the rates and directions of species redistributions in response to climate change and discuss how fu...

A key issue in predicting how ecosystems will respond to environmental change is understanding why populations and communities are able to live and reproduce in some parts of ecological and geographic...

Soil fungi are critical for plants and ecosystems but are also affected by the vegetation itself. Here, we show how an experimental gradient of plant species richness and community fine root traits d...

For a plant, form is function. Despite the diversity of forms that exist in nature, plant root diversity is notoriously understudied compared to their aerial counterpart. This review by Ramachandran…

Aim The scale of environmental data is often defined by their extent (spatial area, temporal duration) and resolution (grain size, temporal interval). Although describing climate data scale via thes...

AbstractBackground and Aims. Poikilohydry describes the inability of plants to internally regulate their water content (hydroregulation), whereas desiccati

Nonstructural carbohydrate (NSC) concentrations might reflect the strategies described in the leaf economic spectrum (LES) due to their dependence on photosynthesis and respiration. We examined if N...

Abstract. The current climate crisis has global impacts and will affect the physiology of plants across every continent. Ensuring resilience of our agricul

Soils from 30 grasslands across Europe were subjected to 4 contrasting extreme climatic events under drought, flood, freezing and heat conditions, with the results suggesting that soil microbiomes fro...

Nature Communications - How climate change will impact microbial community growth is unclear. Here, the authors use a field experiment with varying global change factors, finding fungal growth more...

Understanding how global changes affect both aboveground plants and belowground soil organisms is essential for preserving ecosystem functions and biodiversity. This study synthesizes extensive data, ...

Responses of roots can reveal the strategies and vulnerabilities of tropical ecosystems facing present and future global changes. This analysis of 266 root trait observations from 93 studies across 2...