Abstract: Rapid environmental changes are affecting plant communities worldwide, negatively impacting human societies by the loss of ecosystem services. To anticipate these impacts, it is crucial to better understand plant species functional strategies, elucidate their distribution worldwide and their relationship with vegetation responses to climate. In my work, I aim to clarify how functional traits are coordinated and how their distribution is related to vegetation responses to climate change. First, I build a framework to study traits evolutionary coordination from a multivariate perspective. Then, I use this knowledge to guide a predictive method that allows big data imputation. This methodological and conceptual framework is then applied to several study cases to shed light on some eco-evolutionary patterns of woody plant communities at the global scale.

By doing so, I elucidate the relationship among crucial functional traits and climate change impacts on vegetation such as drought induced mortality. These results can be used to inform ecosystem management, developing new tools to guide decision making which will hopefully lead to more resilient forests in the near future. Moreover, the imputation algorithm presented can also be used to perform gap filling in functional data needed to parameterise land surface models, which are one of the main tools allowing to simulate and understand climate change effects and are limited by the lack of functional data.