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Polygenic risk scores for Alzheimer’s disease derived from individuals of European ancestry can show improved performance in multiancestry settings after incorporating genome-wide association summary statistics from diverse populations.

Actionable research recommendations are outlined to improve the monitoring and modelling of forest resources and their carbon sink, and to better inform forest management decisions and the European Green Deal.

Enough of silos: develop a joint scientific agenda to understand the intertwined global crises of the Earth system.

It is unclear whether trait trade-offs and optimality principles observed at the individual level scale up to the ecosystem level. Here, the authors show that plant trait coordination principles also predict patterns between community-level traits and ecosystem-scale processes.

The authors investigate the broad-scale climatological and soil properties that co-vary with major axes of plant functional traits. They find that variation in plant size is attributed to latitudinal gradients in water or energy limitation, while variation in leaf economics traits is attributed to both climate and soil fertility including their interaction.

Comparing global vegetation trait patterns derived from citizen science data versus those from scientific survey plots, the authors reveal high correlations between the two approaches and improvements over previously published trait maps.

Analyses of the temperature sensitivity of terrestrial carbon turnover suggest that hydrometeorology and temperature control the spatial variability in carbon turnover times globally.

Extreme drought or wet conditions have now been found to strongly influence the vegetative development of ecosystems. Semi-arid regions are most affected — raising concerns about their vulnerability to long-term drought in the future.

The photosynthetic capacity of forest ecosystems is an important variable in the global carbon cycle. Here, it is shown that older, more diverse forests have less fluctuation between years in photosynthetic capacity.

Three key axes of variation of ecosystem functional changes and their underlying causes are identified from a dataset of surface gas exchange measurements across major terrestrial biomes and climate zones.

Artificial Intelligence is transforming the study of extreme climate events like floods, droughts, and wildfires, helping to overcome challenges such as limited data and real-time integration. This review article highlights the need for transparent, reliable AI models to improve disaster response, risk communication and stakeholder trust.

Although plant functional trait combinations reflect ecological trade-offs at the species level, little is known about how this translates to whole communities. Here, the authors show that global trait composition is captured by two main dimensions that are only weakly related to macro-environmental drivers.

Changes in air temperature are usually considered for quantifying changes in temperature extremes such as heatwaves. This study shows that the incidence of heat extremes in soils is increasing faster than air temperature in some regions, with implications for hydrological and biogeochemical processes.

The atmosphere and biosphere are intrinsically coupled systems. Here, the authors integrate multiple datasets from hourly to decadal timescales and show that a hydrometerological envelope constrains ecosystem variability through time.

The authors found that the key elements of plant form and function, analysed at global scale, are largely concentrated into a two-dimensional plane indexed by the size of whole plants and organs on the one hand, and the construction costs for photosynthetic leaf area, on the other.

A steep decline in archiving could make large tree-ring datasets irrelevant. But increased spatiotemporal coverage, the addition of novel parameters at sub-annual resolution, and integration with other in situ and remote Earth observations will elevate tree-ring data as an essential component of global-change research.

Extreme weather and climate events could increase ecosystem disturbances and, potentially, destabilize ecosystems, but different feedbacks between climate and ecosystems are often not accounted for. This Perspective proposes a framework to characterize ecoclimatic events and understand the role of human activities in driving them.

Temporal variation of vertical leaf angles can strongly alter widely used vegetation indices, with the effect dependent on both environment and species, according to an analysis of time series leaf photos and radiative transfer model simulations.

Questions of causality are ubiquitous in Earth system sciences and beyond, yet correlation techniques still prevail. This Perspective provides an overview of causal inference methods, identifies promising applications and methodological challenges, and initiates a causality benchmark platform.

The effects of climate extremes such as droughts or storms on the carbon cycle of ecosystems are investigated; such extremes can decrease regional carbon stocks.

Research on compound events has increased vastly in the last several years, yet, a typology was absent. This Review proposes a comprehensive classification scheme, incorporating compound events that are preconditioned, multivariate, temporally compounding and spatially compounding events.