A problem of scale: why species diversity does not matter (as much as we might like it to)

Scaling is critically important for global change research, as it provides the means for extending mechanistic understanding across space, time and organizational levels. For example, scaling is required to address questions such as, “How do individual plant responses to climate change impact terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycling?” But how is such scaling accomplished in complex ecosystems harboring many plant species? The answer lies in the most abundant (dominant) plants in ecosystems. I will discuss how a focus on a few plant species, rather than species or functional diversity, can allow us to meet the challenge of scaling in global change research.