Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110, 18180–18184 (2013)

Investigating the response of plants to climate change typically involves categorization into simple fixed functional types (such as grasses, shrubs and so on). This can be a powerful approach for capturing and modelling the impacts of climate on plants and the associated biogeochemical feedbacks, but it has the drawback that much of the variety in the way that individual species function is lost in the classification process.

To address this shortcoming Nadejda Soudzilovskaia, from VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and co-workers investigated the potential of plant functional traits — associated with particular plant features — to explain the responses of vegetation to environmental change.

In their test site in the Caucasus Mountains in Russia, they found that the traits that promote minimal water use in leaves — such as greater leaf mass per area, and large belowground reserves, indicated by root carbon content — were the best predictors of species that increase their abundance in association with rising temperatures. This aproach shows promise for improving the forecasting of plant responses to climate change.