Much of plant physiological ecology is focused on using traits and processes measured on individual leaves and stems to predict the implications of environmental change for whole plants or communities. However, the structure of a plant' canopy -- the arrangement of its leaves and other tissues in space -- can also mediate its response to abiotic stress or biotic interactions. Moreover, the architecture of the canopy creates unique microclimate environments with well-established consequences for fundamental physiological processes like photosynthesis, thermoregulation, resource allocation, and hydraulic transport. Thus, a fundamental gap still exists in linking the variation in leaf traits and processes to canopy scale physiology. Closing this gap would have great implications for improving models of ecosystem fluxes, and would enhance our understanding of the environmental controls on plant strategies. In this organized oral session, we bring together speakers whose work integrates physiological measurements on leaves and branches with the function and geometry of entire plant canopies. We place particular emphasis on physiological processes related to photosynthesis, respiration, and other aspects of carbon economics. The speakers assembled come from multiple areas of expertise with a common goal of more accurately representing processes and traits at the canopy level. Speakers will explore our current understanding of crown-level variation in physiological traits, covariance and feedbacks between crown and leaf traits, responses to stress in both leaf and whole crown physiology, and advances in scaling up leaf-level physiology (and its community- and ecosystem-wide consequences) to whole complex canopies. The speakers in this session have also taken novel approaches to link leaf and canopy processes, including new physiological measurement methods, remote sensing of physiology, and linkages with previously unconsidered variables. The session will not only explore how to scale measurements, but also on the feedbacks of canopy structure on leaf-level processes and the implications of this feedback in a changing climate. Through this session, we aim to combine insights from these diverse perspectives and methods into a synthesis of the emergent properties of plant communities at the canopy scale.