Biodiversity is declining rapidly under stark pressures from human activities and climate change, highlighting the need for biodiversity observations and monitoring that can contribute to advancing global biodiversity targets, help guide biological conservation and restoration and address critical science questions related to changes in ecosystem functioning and resilience. Towards this end, remote sensing is an increasingly valuable tool to address urgent biodiversity science questions at a range of spatial and temporal scales from genes to biomes at diurnal to decadal time scales. In this session, we present contributions that utilize remote sensing to address science questions in an interdisciplinary context related to biodiversity and its vital connections to plant functional traits, ecosystem functioning and services, and the environment. The presentations cover different remote sensing techniques, such as imaging spectroscopy and lidar, in a range of ecosystems, such as grasslands, bushlands, forests and mixed landcover types in arctic to tropical climates, and at spatial scales from individual communities to whole landscapes.