Is canopy complexity a global predictor of forest growth? Using NEON to understand ecosystem structure-production relationships across broad spatial scales

Understanding structure-function interactions is fundamental to ecosystem science. While the quantity of canopy leaves is a universal predictor of forest primary production, the arrangement of canopy leaves may be equally important to predictions of primary production by representing mechanistic information not captured with leaf quantity alone. Our previous site-level work established a causal chain between the complexity of leaf arrangement, resource-use-efficiency and distribution, and primary production. We are using the NEON platform to examine the universality of leaf arrangement-primary production relationships across forest ecosystems and ecoclimatic domains, and investigating the wider implications for remote sensing, scaling, and carbon cycle modeling.