Associate Professor Florida State University Tallahassee, Florida, United States
Understanding how traits and spectra are constrained by evolutionary history is important for predicting how organisms will respond to environmental change. Grasses represent one of the most diverse flowering plant families and are dominant on over 25% of the land surface. I will show how leaf reflectance spectra from ~50 grass species collected from a diversity of sites group by evolutionary lineage with over 90% accuracy. I will also show how spectra from the same species can vary across sites and discuss what this means for using spectral endmembers to predict grass distributions and ecosystem functions across landscapes.
