Functional Diversity in Land Surface Modeling: Where and When Does It Matter for the Terrestrial Carbon Cycle?

Plant functional traits moderate ecosystem responses to climate and exchanges of water and carbon between the land surface and the atmosphere. However, the extent to which diversity in functional traits influences global carbon and hydrological cycles is a major unknown. The scaling gap between site-level analyses and global biogeochemical cycling makes it difficult to develop informed protocols for representing physiologically diverse organismal responses in a parsimonious manner suitable for l