Workshop on Plant traits, Hamburg

I went to a Ginkgo workshop on advancing traits and trade-offs in mechanistic vegetation models across scales. The workshop was organized by Philipp Porada, head of the Ecological Modeling research group at the Institute of Plant Science and Microbiology at the University of Hamburg. We started with presentations from a variety of researchers who focus on traits which gave different perspectives on this topic. I was fascinated by talks about methods on trait composition emergence at given abiotic conditions just based on prescribed trade-offs among traits in mechanistic models. We closed the workshop by a broader discussion on goals as well as development and improvement of trait-based models. In particular, we discussed what traits mean for modellers as opposed to the empiricists' viewpoint. With this discussion, we aimed at moving forward the development of trait-based dynamic vegetation models.