The first meeting of this working group gave rise to several lines of work. It became evident that there was opportunity to assemble data about decomposition rates and to incorporate it into earth system models, and working groups 17, 19 and 20 arose from this. Conceptual discussion about the "inheritance" of traits over time in vegetation gave rise to Ackerly and Cornwell (2007). A program was begun in collaboration with QUEST UK to incorporate quantitative trait information from GLOPNET into the Sheffield DGVM. This was reported in a News Feature in Nature (Whitfield 2006 Nature 440:539-541).

At a second meeting 18-22 September 2006, the effect of incorporating quantitative traits into the Sheffield DGVM was assessed and a further program of investigations was outlined. There was incorporation of nutrient-cycling considerations into an Ecosystem-Demography (ED) module for the QUEST modeling program. Wang from CSIRO will be visiting Sheffield during 2007 to press this work forward. It is also proposed that QUEST and the Vegetation Function Network collaborate to gather together the best exemplar datasets from round the world to test the ED module. There was discussion of theory for the ratio of sapwood cross-section to leaf area, transferred from WG6. There was also general conceptual discussion, which has led to a proposal to ARC to work towards an evolutionary ecology vegetation model (EEVM).

A further meeting will be scheduled as soon as possible.

Publications resulting so far
Ackerly, D.D. and W.K. Cornwell. (2007) A trait-based approach to community assembly: partitioning of species trait values into within- and among-community components. Ecology Letters 10:135-145.

Last updated March 2007