By the Numbers

Research themes, ranked by size

• Community assembly, phylogeny and biogeography 31 papers
  Trait–phylogeny methods and theory for community assembly, plus macroevolutionary and biogeographic patterns across plants and other taxa, including metrics and climate–range dynamics.
  Insect pollination for most of angiosperm evolutionary history (2023) · Sexual dimorphism in trait variability and its eco-evolutionary and statistical implications (2020)
• Plant functional traits and climate/CO2 24 papers
  Global patterns and theory for photosynthesis and leaf economics, hydraulic and structural traits, and experimental responses to CO2, water and soils across biomes including tundra.
  When and where soil is important to modify the carbon and water economy of leaves (2020) · Global plant trait relationships extend to the climatic extremes of the tundra biome (2020)
• Biodiversity data infrastructure and big‑data ecology 18 papers
  Software, databases and machine learning that expand, align and analyze biodiversity and trait data, alongside global macroecological inference from massive observation datasets.
  infinitylists: A Shiny application and R package for rapid generation of place‐based species checklists (2025) · Decoupling both local and global abundance from global range size, challenging the abundance-occupancy relationship in birds (2025)
• Decomposition and nutrient cycling 16 papers
  Drivers and models of leaf and wood decomposition, stoichiometry and nutrient release, and how plant traits and microbes determine decay trajectories from local to global scales.
  Faster than expected: release of nitrogen and phosphorus from decomposing woody litter (2025) · Initial wood trait variation overwhelms endophyte community effects for explaining decay trajectories (2022)
• Mycorrhizae and fungal functional ecology 14 papers
  Evolution and ecology of plant–fungal mutualisms and fungal life histories, global patterns of mycorrhizal colonization, and trait‑based frameworks for fungal function.
  Progressing beyond colonization strategies to understand arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal life history (2024) · Fungal functional ecology: bringing a trait‐based approach to plant‐associated fungi (2020)
• Citizen science and urban biodiversity 11 papers
  Using citizen science for biodiversity discovery, data quality, targeted sampling and urban restoration and planning, with applications from birds to plants and postfire fauna.
  Citizen science records are fuelling exciting discoveries of new plant species (2025) · Expert identification blitz: A rapid high value approach for assessing and improving iNaturalist identification accuracy and data precision and confidence (2025)
• Ecosystem restoration and habitat change 9 papers
  Impacts of land and seascape alteration (dams, urban reserves, reefs) and restoration on biodiversity, soil and carbon stocks, and plant trait filtering in novel riparian zones.
  Traits Associated With Local Extinctions of Native Plants in a Species‐Rich Urban Reserve (2025) · Natural and Regenerated Saltmarshes Exhibit Similar Soil and Belowground Organic Carbon Stocks, Root Production and Soil Respiration (2019)
• Litter flammability and fire–decay traits 8 papers
  How plant functional traits govern litterbed flammability, the (de)coupling of decomposability and flammability, and nonadditive mixture effects that link species composition to fire behavior.
  Experimental evidence that leaf litter decomposability and flammability are decoupled across gymnosperm species (2023) · Are litter decomposition and fire linked through plant species traits? (2017)
• Fire ecology and postfire biodiversity 8 papers
  Fire response strategies and seed pyro-thermal niches, open data infrastructures for fire traits, and multi-taxon biodiversity responses and rapid assessments after large wildfires.
  Continental‐scale empirical evidence for relationships between fire response strategies and fire frequency (2025) · Defining the pyro‐thermal niche: do seed traits, ecosystem type and phylogeny influence thermal thresholds in seeds with physical dormancy? (2025)
• Termites and deadwood decay 7 papers
  How termites and other macrodetritivores discover and consume wood, interact with microbes, and shape global deadwood turnover and carbon cycling across climates and continents.
  Termite discovery disrupts microbial succession and deadwood decay (2026) · Biogeographical Variation in Termite Distributions Alters Global Deadwood Decay (2024)
• Climate‑ready conservation and monitoring tech 6 papers
  Applying functional diversity to conservation planning and forecasting climate risks with novel monitoring methods (drones, acoustics, spectral diversity) for arid and threatened fauna and flora.
  Accounting for functional diversity in biodiversity protection measures (2026) · Predicting decay in functional diversity in plant communities under future climates (2026)
• Biocrusts, lichens and mosses 5 papers
  Ecology of cryptogamic communities including spectral trait detection, tissue chemistry, and climate-driven range shifts and transplant syntheses across drylands and beyond.
  Limited range shifting in biocrusts despite climate warming: A 25‐year resurvey (2023) · Towards an understanding of future range shifts in lichens and mosses under climate change (2023)

Theme mix by year

Themes by career period

Each bubble is a theme: x is the mean publication year, y is how many years the theme has been active (span between its earliest and latest paper), size is paper count.

Publications per year, by authorship role