Yaoqi Li

Functional traits reflect the strategies how plants interact with their environment and thus are used as indicators of plant fitness and to characterize plant habitats. Trait-based studies indicated that some key leaf traits can be used to scale from individuals to ecosystem functioning. For example, local in-situ studies showed that community weighted functional traits were positively correlated with forest aboveground biomass. However, how functional traits co-vary with each other to show trade-offs among species, how climate shapes both plant traits and ecosystem primary productivity, whether we can use those findings to predict ecosystem functioning and thus how to improve vegetation modeling need further assessment.

Yaoqi has finished the compilation of data on several vegetative and reproductive traits of angiosperms. With the unique large trait database, a relatively reliable distribution database built in Peking University and a combination of methods and theory in IIASA, she aims to explore the covariance among traits and functional diversity at different spatial scales to understand the response of plants to climate and its linkage to ecosystem functioning, and potentially improve vegetation models by including components of trait variation.

Her research will promote our understanding of community dynamics and ecosystem functioning under the background of human disturbance and global climate change by scaling up from individual to community and then ecosystem level.

Read more about Dr. Li here (http://www.macroecology-pku.org/PeopleDetail.aspx?id=16).

Last edited: 22 October 2020