Description
Plants dominate the biomass of terrestrial ecosystems, providing the overarching habitats and foods for most other organisms. Recent research on plant diversity moves from counting species richness to focus on functional traits. Traits are the bridge to scale from individual performance to community structure and stability, with functional diversity as the essential indicator of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning. However, it is still a large gap in trait data, either in functional groups or geographical regions, although the ongoing accumulation of massive open-trait database and improvement of trait gap-filling approaches. Assembling global biodiversity information is challenging especially for the extremely diverse global angiosperms with disparate information at various scales and resolutions. By integrating current available trait data, the dated phylogenies, and environmental factors, this project will be conducted to, a) integrate available plant traits across the world; 2) analysis the gaps across space and in the Tree of Life; 3) comparing imputation methods and improve modelling. This project will employ a multi-disciplinary approach to predict trait distribution, providing basic data to prompt the development of trait-based ecology and support biodiversity conservation and management.| Period | Sept 2023 → Jul 2025 |
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| Degree of Recognition | National |