Biodiversity is organized hierarchically from individuals to populations to major lineages in the tree of life. This hierarchical structure has consequences for how functions of plants that influence ecosystem processes vary among lineages. It also has implications for remote sensing of plant phenotypes, leading to the expectation that more distantly related plants will be more spectrally distinct. The associations between plant spectral, functional and phylogenetic relationships among species provides the basis for spectral diversity as a critical metric for detecting biodiversity patterns, albeit with caveats. Shared ancestry and the hierarchical organization of life results in the empirical finding that most plant functional groups used in manipulated diversity experiments or in global vegetation models have a phylogenetic basis. Detection of plant functional-phylogenetic groups thus have the potential to be important predictors of ecosystem processes, including belowground microbial processes, as well as predictors of susceptibility to pests and pathogens and to other forces of global change.
Results/Conclusions
In this symposium talk I will synthesize results from a series of recent and ongoing studies with collaborators across institutions and post docs and students in my lab. We have found that spectral variation in plants—measured at different biological scales from leaves to whole plant canopies to ecosystems—can predict both functional and phylogenetic diversity, when spatial scale is appropriately considered, and that spectral fingerprints at the leaf level can predict where in the tree of life an individual fits. We further find that remote detection of plant functional-phylogenetic groups predicts a series of belowground processes in herbaceous communities; that spectroscopically detected diversity and composition in manipulated tree diversity experiments predicts ecosystem productivity and overyielding; and that detection of plant lineages and species in naturally assembled forests of the Upper Midwest is a critical step in disease monitoring. Phylogenetic relatedness is an important predictor of plant vulnerability to pest and pathogen threats and potentially to climate change. Shared ancestry and the hierarchical organization of life thus have far-reaching consequences for spectroscopic detection of plant phylogenetic-functional groups across many scales, for detecting biodiversity change and its consequences, and for predicting ecosystem responses to forces of global change.