What would the plant do? Predicting contributions of plants to the global carbon cycle though adaptive dynamics of plant traits

Plants are impressive organisms. They often amaze with their ability to overcome new situations and grow in unlikely environments. The responsiveness of plant communities to changing environments can make predictions made from our empirical understanding of them without such environments difficult. As we aim to predict the fate of the global carbon sink in response to climate change we may do well to formalize possible plant responses by grounding them only by unbreakable biophysical constraints and unavoidable adaptive drivers – the individual level selection process of both ecological community assembly and evolutionary change.