Plant Functional Types: their Relevance to Ecosystem Properties and Global Change

IGBP Book Series No. 1

When predicting the effects of changing climate and carbon dioxide on plants at the global scale there is a major stumbling block: we have very little information, in many cases none, about how plants will respond in the future. In order to circumvent this problem, and until more information on species accumulates, we reduce the diversity of species to a diversity of functions and structures. The structures may be trees, shrubs, herbs and grasses. The functions may be types of photosynthetic process, the capacity to minimize water loss, and varying the timing of growth. This book brings together a first-rate team of authors to describe approaches and methods for defining these functional types in ways that maximize our potential to predict accurately the responses of real vegetation with real species diversity.