Organising committee:

Veronica Arana, CONICET, Argentina @veronicaarana.bsky.social

Ant Dodd, John Innes Centre, UK @antdodd.bsky.social

Josh Gendron, Yale, USA

Carlos Hotta, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil

Nathalie Verbruggen, Free University of Brussels, Belgium

(🧵 7/7) With the support of a dedicated co-author team, it grew to include data contributions from more than 600 literature sources, enabling a comprehensive synthesis of the global extent of intraspecific variation in wood density.

(🧵 6/7) The project was initiated over seven years ago by Fabian Jörg Fischer, Jérôme Chave and Amy Zanne with the goal of updating the Global Wood Density Database (GWDD), one of the most widely used plant trait databases of the past 15 years.

🌱 The authors behind the paper 🌱

(🧵 5/7) This Community resource article was co-authored by a large, interdisciplinary team of researchers, including forest ecologists, plant physiologists, biogeographers, and carbon-cycle researchers from 28 countries across all continents.

(🧵 4/7) In this Community resource, Fischer et al. assembled the most comprehensive wood density collection to date, including 109,626 records from 16,829 plant species across woody life forms and biomes.

(🧵 3/7) Predicting the wood density of individual plants is difficult, so reliable estimates require systematic sampling across different individuals and tissues as well as global databases paired with integrative models.

(🧵 2/7) Wood density underpins woody plant function and carbon storage. It varies among and within species, typically increasing in hotter and drier environments and on more acidic soils.