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Monitoring plant functional diversity from space

An Erratum to this article was published on 14 March 2016

The world's ecosystems are losing biodiversity fast. A satellite mission designed to track changes in plant functional diversity around the globe could deepen our understanding of the pace and consequences of this change, and how to manage it.

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Figure 1: The data gap in regional species trait measurements.
Figure 2: The envisioned global biodiversity observatory.

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Acknowledgements

This study is an output of the ‘Biodiversity from Space’ Working Group of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) and was produced with support from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) grant no. NNX14AN31G to NCEAS, University of California, Santa Barbara. Part of this research was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. The work also benefited from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant nos GEO-1408965 (or “Support for the Future Earth Interim Director and Implementation”) and DBI-1262600; NASA grant no. NNX11AP72G to W.J. and R.G.; NSF–NASA Dimensions of Biodiversity grant no. DEB-1342872 to J.C.B.; and the University of Zurich Research Priority Program on ‘Global Change and Biodiversity’ to M.E.S. and F.D.S.

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W.J. and J.C.-B. contributed equally to this work.

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Correspondence to Walter Jetz or Jeannine Cavender-Bares.

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Jetz, W., Cavender-Bares, J., Pavlick, R. et al. Monitoring plant functional diversity from space. Nature Plants 2, 16024 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nplants.2016.24

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