Challenges and opportunities for global change prediction
While our review confirms growing interest in and application of traits-based frameworks to ecological patterns, applications have primarily been descriptive—highlighting a persistent gap in application to ecological prediction, and in particular, predicting dynamics under global change. In synthesizing existing work, at least four key themes emerged in terms of guiding future work and overcoming barriers to trait-based predictions of global change outcomes: (1) matching the scale of trait measurement to the ecological processes disrupted by global change, (2) increasing the resolution of environmental and ecological gradients along which traits are measured, (3) moving beyond body size and toward multivariate trait assemblages to describe and predict ecological processes, (4) accounting for intraspecific trait variation in predicted responses to global change.