Researchers from Institute of Applied Ecology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences report the responses of community-level traits to long-term drought across three grasslands of northern China.

Nitrogen (N) is a major plant nutrient that influences the productivity, composition and function of forests. Plants compete with soil microbes for soil N in the forms of inorganic and organic N. R...

Climate change significantly affects forest ecosystems. However, little is known about whether non-native and native tree species show similar responses to global warming.

The vast variety of leaf morphology are important manifestation of plant functional diversity, and simple- and compound-leaf forms are prominent traits of leaf morphology of trees.

Soil seed bank, as the basis of all vegetation processes, can provide diaspores for population maintenance and community assembly. bv