Search

Plant functional traits govern ecosystem processes but lack spatially detailed global representations. Here, the authors combine remote sensing and crowd-sourced biodiversity data to map leaf trait distributions and their higher-order moments worldwide.

Researchers have found that extreme hot-wet weather in 2024 triggered a spike in ecosystem respiration, mainly in tropical non-forests, significantly reducing the year’s land carbon sink and pushing the atmospheric CO2 growth rate to a record high.

Climate warming alters plant lifecycles, but the extent of these shifts is also determined by plants’ inherent traits, not just climate.

Global observations show that ecosystems sustain transpiration at temperatures above those that maximize photosynthesis. This thermal gap reveals that carbon uptake declines before water loss under climate warming.

Isoprene and monoterpenes, emitted by terrestrial plants, have an important role in both plant biology and environment, but they are poorly quantified at the ecosystem level. Peñuelas et al.show that the photochemical reflectance index can be used to indirectly estimate foliar isoprenoid emissions remotely.

Machine learning upscaling analyses of global FLUXNET carbon and water flux measurements indicate that dryland vegetation productivity showed a negligible increase between 1982–2000 and 2001–2022, whereas humid-region vegetation productivity exhibited a nearly constant increase.

Bioavailable nitrogen is increasing due to human activity, rapidly outpacing increases in another essential nutrient, phosphorous. Peñuelas et al.show that this increasing imbalance between these nutrients is likely to significantly affect life and limit carbon storage in this century.

Soil microbes recycle nutrients, but their global nutrient use efficiency is poorly understood. This study finds microbial nitrogen-use efficiency is nearly twice phosphorus-use efficiency, driven by soil carbon content, and is lowest in tundra and boreal forests.

This study finds that native tree extinctions and alien naturalizations are pushing forests towards fast-growing, resource-demanding species. This global shift could affect carbon storage and ecosystem stability, highlighting the need to protect slow-growing trees.

Urban parks enhance microbial functionality but reduce genomic diversity compared with forests due to nutrient enrichment and pH changes. Urbanization drives short-term functional gains at the cost of long-term evolutionary flexibility.

Combining metabolic theory with global datasets, Li et al. show that root water content is a stronger predictor of root growth traits than the widely considered root nitrogen, better reflecting fast acquisition strategies and leaf–root alignment.

In this Review, the authors describe current knowledge of microbial phosphorus cycling in terrestrial ecosystems and discuss how microbial communities respond to environmental and anthropogenic pressures. They also propose the Microbial Phosphorus Adaptive Evolution Theory (MPAET) — a mechanistic framework linking persistent phosphorus limitation to evolutionary adaptations across cellular, genomic and community scales.

Tracking vegetation change in sub-Saharan Africa between 1992 and 2011, the authors reveal contrasting patterns in woody cover between drylands and humid zones, with decreases in both areas associated with high human population growth.

CO₂-driven warming reduces phosphorus availability in rice paddies by promoting its binding with iron and organic carbon in the soil, according to a ten-year experiment using a free-air CO₂ enrichment system to simulate in situ climate warming.

In Eastern Asia, vegetation greening, especially in perennial drylands, has increasingly reduced dust emissions since the early 2000s, with effects amplified over long timescales, underscoring the mitigating capacity of land-surface change for multi-decadal dust trends.

Addressing how the nitrogen-induced changes in plant diversity differ from those in soil organisms is critical. This global meta-analysis suggests that nitrogen enrichment has stronger negative effects on plant diversity but modest to negligible effects on soil bacterial and fungal diversity.

Shifts in phenology can significantly impact organism fitness, ecosystem function, and the provision of ecosystem goods and services. Through a global meta-analysis, this study shows how shifts in the timing of leaf-out and first flowering due to warming and precipitation changes depend on plant functional group and climate region.

Climate change is altering how plants balance carbon gain and water loss. This study maps global leaf-level water-use efficiency over the past two decades, showing it is highest in regions that are cold or dry, increasing worldwide, and strongly influenced by atmospheric dryness.

This study reveals that crops with clumped canopy architectures achieve higher yields and lower N₂O emissions, presenting a promising strategy to enhance agricultural productivity and sustainability globally.

This study reveals that the varying responses of plant biomass to phosphorus addition across plant functional groups align with the leaf economics spectrum, with plants characterized by more acquisitive traits exhibiting stronger responses to phosphorus addition.

Rapid urbanization has led to widespread increases in artificial light at night, yet its ecological impacts remain underexplored. Using multi-scale data from 452 cities worldwide, this study suggests that artificial light tends to delay leaf senescence in vegetation, with implications for balancing urban development and ecosystem conservation.

The transport of aerosols from distant fires in deforested and savannah regions supplies phosphorus to undisturbed Amazon rainforests and influences their productivity, according to modelled phosphorus deposition estimates and satellite data.

Chemoautotrophic carbon fixation is vital for evaluating permafrost carbon-climate feedback, but has been largely ignored. Here the authors find that dark carbon fixation predominates ~1/3 of the investigated thermokarst lakes on the Tibetan Plateau.

Earlier thawing of permafrost in northern high latitudes is reshaping the timing of spring growth and energy balance of Arctic ecosystems. This study suggests that advancing thaw increasingly stimulates land surface greening through enhanced water availability, earlier vegetation activity, and reduced albedo.

Freezing temperatures often persist over consecutive days in natural environments, yet the duration of frost events has been largely neglected. This study shows that prolonged frost events cause greater declines in forest growth than isolated frost episodes across the Northern Hemisphere.

Despite growing aquaculture production and environmental concerns on phosphorus (P) enrichment, the P budgets of fisheries have been largely overlooked. Here, Huang et al. calculate global fishery P budgets and estimate P use efficiency for a wide range of aquaculture systems.

The Arctic–boreal fire regime is greatly affected by biophysical and biological feedbacks from permafrost degradation, according to long-term observations of soil active layer thickness from 1997 to 2018 and causal inference modelling.

Climate change is increasing the frequency of flash droughts worldwide, posing threats to global ecosystems. This study suggests that flash droughts cause 1.5 times greater vegetation loss than conventional droughts and delay ecosystem recovery, with impacts intensifying over recent decades.

Climate warming is accelerating successional dynamics, with late-successional species rapidly outcompeting pioneer species at Himalayan treeline ecotones, offering insight into future forest succession and its influences on ecosystem services.

Although climate change is known to abruptly shift ecosystem functions, the response of belowground ecosystem multifunctionality to climate scenarios is less understood. This study predicts that climate change will reduce global belowground ecosystem multifunctionality.

Forests with higher tree species richness show greater photosynthesis by capturing more sunlight, highlighting the essential role of biodiversity in enhancing carbon uptake and supporting the global carbon sink.

The authors theoretically delineate the maximal increases in tree growth that can be expected from increases in plant intrinsic water-use efficiency, which increases with rising CO₂. They highlight environmental and physiological limits on growth in the context of experimental data.

Forest responses can have major effects on tree architecture and community structure near the edges of forest fragments. Here, using terrestrial LiDAR scanning data from long-term forest plots, the authors find a net negative effect of fragmentation on Amazonian Forest aboveground biomass.

The response of the phosphorus (P) cycle to permafrost thaw is unknown, but has implications for carbon dynamics. This study assesses changes in the P cycle upon abrupt thaw and shows accelerated soil P cycling and increased plant uptake, which may boost primary production and partially offset soil carbon loss.

This study reports that grassland degradation reduces ecosystem functionality while promoting soil biodiversity, highlighting the role of this diversity in sustaining degraded grasslands.

Nitrogen and phosphorus limitations are both key to spatial patterns and temporal trends in primary production. This global analysis indicates that phosphorus limitation on terrestrial primary productivity has become stronger and is increasing more rapidly than nitrogen limitation.

Ecosystems filter environmental variability through internal regulatory mechanisms, resulting in more predictable carbon fluxes than the weather conditions they experience. Here, the authors find that more productive ecosystems exhibit higher temporal complexity in their carbon cycling. This short-term complexity appears to be increasing over time, potentially indicating greater ecosystem responsiveness to environmental stimuli.

Precipitation is a key driver of plant growth. Here the authors integrate ground-based observations, remote sensing and process-based models to disentangle the relative contribution of preceding-year and current-year precipitation on plant productivity and identify its predictors across biomes.

The identification of a general connection between biogeochemistry and the structure of food webs would constitute a considerable advance in understanding ecosystems. Ecologists are on the case.

Inorganic fertilization reduces plant biodiversity. Here, the authors conduct a global meta-analysis on the use of organic and inorganic fertilizer in croplands and grasslands, showing that while both fertilizers increase plant biomass, only organic fertilizer increases biodiversity.

Satellite records combined with global ecosystem models show a persistent and widespread greening over 25–50% of the global vegetated area; less than 4% of the globe is browning. CO₂ fertilization explains 70% of the observed greening trend.

Topsoil nitrogen stocks declined over a ten-year field warming experiment in a permafrost ecosystem due to enhanced plant nitrogen uptake, nitrogen leaching and gaseous losses, suggesting that permafrost soil nitrogen stocks are vulnerable to warming.

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.