Abstract
Plant traits–‘morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants and their organs’ (Kattgeet al., 2011)–are increasingly being harnessed by empiricists and modelers as a framework to understand patterns in the structure and function of species across the globe. Trait-based ecology, which emphasizes functional traits over the taxonomical relationships among organisms (Laliberte,2017), promises to improve generality, synthesis, and predictive ability across ecological scales (Shipley et al., 2016). Indeed, plant trait studies are increasingly prominent in the literature: a simple Web of Science search on the term indicates a surge in publications from 2576during the three-year period from 1999 to 2001 to 13 234 in the three-year period between 2014 and 2016. However, the most common plant traits described in the literature relate to above-ground organs and their function, including leaf morphology, photosynthetic parameters, and aboveground growth rate. Root traits, particularly those of fine roots associated with critical belowground plant functions, are much less studied–they are, after all, harder to measure and less likely to have a role in ecosystem models as they are encoded today
