The Paper Trail T HE P APER T RAIL From Ecological Strategies to Trait Ecology Editor’s Note: In this issue of The Paper Trail, an upcoming researcher, who got hooked on ecology in part through a trip to the Amazon, has made a connection with an established ecologist, who is interested in the categorization schemes developed by his predecessors The Bermuda Triangle in the Atlantic Ocean has been said to be the place where aircraft and ships have mysteriously disappeared So what does that have to with these two ecologists—nothing, but they have worked on another triangle—Grime’s CSR triangle In this case, disappearance is not the issue, but the age-old question of how plant communities assemble and why? Pretty messy stuff and these two along with their colleagues are aiming to figure it out — Stephen L.Young The Arising Researcher pursuing ecology as a profession I had been encouraged by professors who worked in marine commuWhile I didn’t go to college with the intention nity ecology conducting detailed experiments that of becoming a biologist, by the end of my time as I found fascinating, and my notion of what biodian undergraduate I was certain of my interest in versity looks like was completely shattered after 32 Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, 98(1) spending a month studying tropical forest ecology in the Amazon in my junior year While those two threads motivated my interest in the field, when I started graduate school in 2003 it seemed impossible to fit both a focus on mechanistic community ecology questions and a love for hyper-­diverse tropical forests into a single laboratory or Ph.D project All this changed when I stumbled into the growing field of phylogenetic community ecology at the same time I began my Ph.D The approaches offered a way to ask community ecology questions of any assemblage with a species list and a phylogeny, even someplace as diverse as a ­tropical rainforest In particular, the extension of these approaches to functional traits that David Ackerly, Will Cornwell, and others were developing at the time seemed powerful At the end of my second year, I made a commitment to try and apply these phylogenetic and functional approaches to a spectacularly diverse forest plot in the Ecuadorian Amazon, near where I had traveled as an undergraduate While still working on my Ph.D., I got to know the field of plant functional traits and the contributions of Mark Westoby and his laboratory group, which loomed large in my readings and my thinking In particular, the 1998 paper, “A leaf-­height-­ seed (LHS) plant ecology strategy scheme” (Plant and Soil 199:213–227) played an important role in orienting me to this growing field What was especially helpful to me was that the paper acted as a conceptual bridge from Phil Grime’s work on plant ecological strategy schemes, in particular the CSR triangle model (1977, American Naturalist 111:1169–1194), which I had learned about in several of my ecology courses In the paper, Mark makes the point that the conceptual tradeoffs, such as between competition and stress tolerance, central to strategy schemes can be directly captured by functional traits and easily compared across ­locations or, in my case, across the taxonomic diversity of a tropical forest plot Mark’s work was important to me because it helped me to triangulate on a research area that bridges the mechanistic focus of functional ecology with traditional community ecology questions Nathan Kraft in the Yasuní Forest Dynamics plot in 2006 Photograph by Adam Martin It has been an exciting and productive research area to be a part of for the last few years, though I think many of my colleagues working in this area would agree that we still have a ways to go, particularly in doing better at linking trait differences to species coexistence at local scales As students interested in these questions join my laboratory, Mark’s contribution is one of the first places that I have them start their journey Nathan J B Kraft University of California Los Angeles, California USA © 2017 The Authors The Bulletin of the Ecological Society of America, published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., on behalf of the Ecological Society of America This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited The Paper Trail January 2017   33 ... rainforest In particular, the extension of these approaches to functional traits that David Ackerly, Will Cornwell, and others were developing at the time seemed powerful At the end of my second year,... Ph.D., I got to know the field of plant functional traits and the contributions of Mark Westoby and his laboratory group, which loomed large in my readings and my thinking In particular, the 1998... contribution is one of the first places that I have them start their journey Nathan J B Kraft University of California Los Angeles, California USA © 2017 The Authors The Bulletin of the Ecological Society