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.