Understanding and predicting how ecosystems change and interact with climate is challenging the climate modeling community to adequately represent vegetative functions.  Current land models typically assume small numbers of plant “types” based upon assumed similar/aggregated characteristics and roles in ecosystem function. This functional type approach limits our ability to represent dynamic changes in response to climate or environment. A new framework is being developed by DOE’s Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic and NGEE Tropics) with the DOE Accelerated Climate Model for Energy (ACME) that represents vegetation using trait-based methods, which dynamically represent key vegetation characteristics.  This town hall will highlight current developments in trait-based modeling approaches and discuss future research opportunities.