Plant traits—the morphological, anatomical, physiological, biochemical and phenological characteristics of plants—determine how plants respond to environmental factors, affect other trophic levels, and influence ecosystem properties and their benefits and detriments to people. Plant trait data thus represent the basis for a vast area of research spanning from evolutionary biology, community and functional ecology, to biodiversity conservation, ecosystem and landscape management, restoration, biogeography and earth system modelling. Since its foundation in 2007, the TRY database of plant traits has grown continuously. It now provides unprecedented data coverage under an open access data policy and is the main plant trait database used by the research community worldwide. Increasingly, the TRY database also supports new frontiers of trait‐based plant research, including the identification of data gaps and the subsequent mobilization or measurement of new data. To support this development, in this article we evaluate the extent of the trait data compiled in TRY and analyse emerging patterns of data coverage and representativeness. Best species coverage is achieved for categorical traits—almost complete coverage for ‘plant growth form’. However, most traits relevant for ecology and vegetation modelling are characterized by continuous intraspecific variation and trait–environmental relationships. These traits have to be measured on individual plants in their respective environment. Despite unprecedented data coverage, we observe a humbling lack of completeness and representativeness of these continuous traits in many aspects. We, therefore, conclude that reducing data gaps and biases in the TRY database remains a key challenge and requires a coordinated approach to data mobilization and trait measurements. This can only be achieved in collaboration with other initiatives.

Severe droughts have the potential to reduce forest productivity and trigger tree mortality. Most trees face several drought events during their life and therefore resilience to dry conditions may be crucial to long-term survival. We assessed how growth resilience to severe droughts, including its components resistance and recovery, is related to the ability to survive future droughts by using a tree-ring database of surviving and now-dead trees from 118 sites (22 species, >3,500 trees). We found that, across the variety of regions and species sampled, trees that died during water shortages were less resilient to previous non-lethal droughts, relative to coexisting surviving trees of the same species. In angiosperms, drought-related mortality risk is associated with lower resistance (low capacity to reduce impact of the initial drought), while it is related to reduced recovery (low capacity to attain pre-drought growth rates) in gymnosperms. The different resilience strategies in these two taxonomic groups open new avenues to improve our understanding and prediction of drought-induced mortality.

Global climate change is expected to further raise the frequency and severity of extreme events, such as droughts. The effects of extreme droughts on trees are difficult to disentangle given the inherent complexity of drought events (frequency, severity, duration, and timing during the growing season). Besides, drought effects might be modulated by trees’ phenotypic variability, which is, in turn, affected by long‐term local selective pressures and management legacies. Here we investigated the magnitude and the temporal changes of tree‐level resilience (i.e., resistance, recovery, and resilience) to extreme droughts. Moreover, we assessed the tree‐, site‐, and drought‐related factors and their interactions driving the tree‐level resilience to extreme droughts. We used a tree‐ring network of the widely distributed Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) along a 2,800 km latitudinal gradient from southern Spain to northern Germany. We found that the resilience to extreme drought decreased in mid‐elevation and low productivity sites from 1980–1999 to 2000–2011 likely due to more frequent and severe droughts in the later period. Our study showed that the impact of drought on tree‐level resilience was not dependent on its latitudinal location, but rather on the type of sites trees were growing at and on their growth performances (i.e., magnitude and variability of growth) during the predrought period. We found significant interactive effects between drought duration and tree growth prior to drought, suggesting that Scots pine trees with higher magnitude and variability of growth in the long term are more vulnerable to long and severe droughts. Moreover, our results indicate that Scots pine trees that experienced more frequent droughts over the long‐term were less resistant to extreme droughts. We, therefore, conclude that the physiological resilience to extreme droughts might be constrained by their growth prior to drought, and that more frequent and longer drought periods may overstrain their potential for acclimation.

Summary: 1.Long‐term basal area increment (BAI) inAbies pinsapowas studied to investigate the way density‐dependent factors modulate the responses of radial growth to climatic stresses in relict stands of a drought‐sensitive Mediterranean fir.2.First, we verified that spatially explicit competition predicts meanA. pinsapoBAI at our study site; i.e. it modulates the degree to which the average climate‐driven potential for growth is expressed. Second, we verified that the long‐term pattern of temperature predicts the long‐term pattern of BAI, estimated as the main trend over a time period ofc.40 years. Finally, we assessed whether the intensity of tree‐to‐tree competition restrains the potential improvements achieved by our model of BAI when a short‐term, high‐frequency stressor such as drought (inter‐annual precipitation variability) is introduced.3.We applied Dynamic Factor Analysis (DFA) to characterize regional climatic trends and to test the hypothesis that trees subjected to contrasting competition intensity may differ in their growth pattern. Significant long‐term climate trends obtained by DFA were used as predictors of long‐term BAI.4.The mean BAI was mainly determined by competition, whereas growth trends obtained by DFA did not differ among dominant, suppressed and dying trees. Common trends of growth decline were strongly related to long‐term, late‐winter to summer temperatures, while the residuals were related to total annual precipitation, although with decreasing significance as competition increased. Our results support the contention that the reported patterns ofA. pinsapogrowth decline and death occur as a result of the interacting effects of both competition and climate stressors acting at long‐ and short‐term time scales.5.Synthesis. Long‐term climatic drought stress was the main driving factor of growth decline inA. pinsapo. Moreover, trees already suffering from competition (a long‐term stress) were predisposed to decline given an additional short‐term stress, such as a severe drought.