By capturing and transforming resources, trees play an important role in the abundance and quality of habitats used by other organisms, while functional traits associated with each individual confer specific properties to ecosystems. These traits and properties are crucial to the wellbeing of humans, since they are responsible for the provision of multiple ecosystem services. However, changes in habitat suitability caused by global changes are pushing trees to adapt or shift their distribution ranges towards higher latitudes, which will most likely have an effect on the abundance and distribution of services. Hence, this project aims to study the relationships between functional traits of trees and their capacity to adapt or migrate, and integrate these relationships to a joint species distribution model (JSDM) to predict the future distribution of functional traits and the ecosystem services they provide in North America.
