Human activities, such as agriculture and mining, have caused extensive deforestation and degradation of tropical rainforests, reducing them to less than 50% of their pre-industrial land cover. With their restoration emerging as a global challenge, gaining a comprehensive understanding of community assembly and maintenance of ecosystem functioning across various types of (primary, secondary, and degraded) tropical rainforests is critical for generating a roadmap on how to successfully restore degraded tropical rainforests.

Functional traits have been widely proven effective for uncovering community assembly and ecosystem function maintenance in tropical rainforests. However, most studies gravitate toward easily measurable morphological traits, such as specific leaf area and leaf dry matter content. Such traits are not always a proxy for ecophysiological traits, which can directly determine community assembly and ecosystem function maintenance of a tropical rainforest across diverse environments and ecosystems. Therefore, it is urgent to use ecophysiological traits to better understand community assembly and maintenance of ecosystems functioning across varied tropical rainforests.

This research topic aims to provide a platform for communication and integration of findings from different fields (i.e., community ecology, restoration ecology, functional ecology, and conservation biology), deepen and expand the understanding of community assembly and ecosystem functioning in tropical rainforests, and unravel the significant roles that ecophysiological traits play in directing community assembly and maintaining ecosystem functions across different tropical rainforests.

We encourage the submission of theoretical and experimental studies on different tropical rainforest ecosystems, such as tropical lowland rainforests, tropical cloud forests, tropical island forests, and so on. Submissions are encouraged on, but not limited to, the following topics:
• Ecophysiological trait-based community assembly and maintenance of ecosystem functioning across primary and secondary tropical rainforests.
• Ecophysiological traits-based community assembly and maintenance of ecosystem functioning in degraded and restored areas of tropical rainforests.
• Identification of ecophysiological traits that can effectively disentangle community assembly and ecosystem function maintenance in different types of tropical rainforests.
• Trait-based or phylogeny-based conservation strategy for highly endangered keystone species in tropical rainforests.

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Frontiers in Plant Science

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