With rise in molecular techniques which can determine cause and effect relationship between a stimulus (environment or experimental) and plant response ( gene, protein, etc), how relevant are plant functional traits ( physiology morphology & phenology) nowadays?
This is a great point, however one of the advantages of using plant functional traits is that they are relatively easier to measure/obtain via online databases or through field measurements versus molecular techniques. For example, TRY is a global database that has pretty great coverage for commonly measured traits such as SLA, leaf nutrient concentrations, and plant height. Additionally functional trait diversity and composition correspond to fast versus conservative adaptive strategies (Diaz et al. 2016 and Reich 2014) and are related to ecosystem resilience (Laughlin et al. 2014), ecosystem functions (Diaz et al. 2007 and Zhang et al. 2015), and can help infer the community assembly processes that are structuring plant communities at different spatial scales (Lammana et al. 2014, Mouchet et al. 2010, and Thonicke et al. 2022). Finally, for applied ecologists (such as restoration ecologists) functional traits are useful monitoring indicator as there is evidence that functional diversity and composition responds predictably to restoration actions and that they capture greater complexity than species diversity or composition (Laughlin et al. 2017 and Morenos-Mateo. 2020).
Because of this, a functional trait framework remains relevant within the fields of community and restoration ecology as functional traits provide information on how plant communities respond to environmental changes/gradients, impact ecosystem functions, and the trait syndromes that correspond to plant adaptive strategies.
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