Field ecologists and ecosystem modelers face a foundational challenge to simplify structural and functional attributes of belowground terrestrial ecosystems while accurately capturing the diversity observed in nature. An exciting field of research – trait-enabled modeling – is being forged at the intersection of plant ecology and ecosystem modeling, where both communities are seeking to understand and harness covariation among plant and microbial traits. Belowground ecological traits, both structural and functional, are those that define species in terms of their ecological roles and how those species interact with the environment and with other organisms in a community. n this Ignite session we will bring together these two communities, and their respective challenges, and discuss a vision for how belowground traits, more specifically root, rhizosphere, and microbial traits, can facilitate new ways of understanding plant dynamics and ecology. Armed with this knowledge, one can implement trait-enabled approaches to modeling ecosystem function, which allows communities to be assembled based on how microbes, plants, and soils with unique trait combinations perform under a given set of environmental conditions, thus improving our predictive capabilities. We anticipate that pursuing trait covariation and trait-enabled modeling in an Ignite session will provide opportunities for fruitful collaboration between field ecologists and ecosystem modelers as thus advancing this new and evolving capability. Such collaboration will ultimately improve our understanding of how climate and vegetation interact to define the past, current and future distribution of vegetation, and feedbacks to climate.