Digital whole-community phenotyping: tracking morphological and physiological responses of plant communities to environmental changes in the field

Plant traits are informative for ecosystem functions and processes and help to derive general rules and predictions about responses to environmental gradients, global change and perturbations. Ecological field studies often use ‘low-throughput’ methods to assess plant phenotypes and integrate species-specific traits to community-wide indices. In contrast, agricultural greenhouse or lab-based studies often employ ‘high-throughput phenotyping’ to assess plant individuals tracking their growth or fertilizer and water demand. In ecological field studies, remote sensing makes use of freely movable devices like satellites or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) which provide large-scale spatial and temporal data. Adopting such methods for community ecology on a smaller scale may provide novel insights on the phenotypic properties of plant communities and fill the gap between traditional field measurements and airborne remote sensing. However, the trade-off between spatial resolution, temporal resolution and scope of the respective study requires highly specific setups so that the measurements fit the scientific question. We introduce small-scale, high-resolution digital automated phenotyping as a novel source of quantitative trait data in ecological field studies that provides complementary multi-faceted data of plant communities. We customized an automated plant phenotyping system for its mobile application in the field for ‘digital whole-community phenotyping’ (DWCP), capturing the 3-dimensional structure and multispectral information of plant communities. We demonstrated the potential of DWCP by recording plant community responses to experimental land-use treatments over two years. DWCP captured changes in morphological and physiological community properties in response to mowing and fertilizer treatments and thus reliably informed about changes in land-use. In contrast, manually measured community-weighted mean traits and species composition remained largely unaffected and were not informative about these treatments. DWCP proved to be an efficient method for characterizing plant communities, complements other methods in trait-based ecology, provides indicators of ecosystem states, and may help to forecast tipping points in plant communities often associated with irreversible changes in ecosystems.