Harnessing plant spectra to integrate the biodiversity sciences across biological and spatial scales.

Plants provide the productive basis for all other life, and their diversity is critical for the Earth’s life support systems. Many plant species are at risk for extinction due to global change factors, including drought stress, exotic species invasions, pathogens, land-use change combined with altered disturbance regimes (e.g., fi re), application of chemicals, and overexploitation. One in fi ve species within the Plant Kingdom is thought to be threatened with extinction ( Kew Royal Botanic Gardens, 2016 ). Given the multifaceted consequences of plant biodiversity for providing the ecosystem services on which humans depend, including the food we grow, the regulating services that maintain our fresh water supply and provision the multitude of organisms we care about, plant biodiversity is important to understand and to monitor across scales from genetic variation at local scales to the entire plant tree of life. Here we argue that deeper understanding and wider application of plant electromagnetic spectra—the patterns of light absorbed, transmitted, and refl ected at diff erent wavelengths from plants—can integrate previously disparate sectors of biodiversity science and the remote sensing community at multiple biological and spatial scales.