Climate change is affecting all ecosystems across the globe. These effects can range from small scale changes in an individual plant’s leaf size up to large scale shifts in species distributions. Climate change experiments have uncovered many of these changes in plant traits and plant community properties, but we still lack a complete understanding of how these climate change stressors, such as warming and drought, will affect plants across the globe. Furthermore, we know that plant responses to climate change can be context dependent, given that numerous studies have shown conflicting stress responses for a single trait. For example, warming may either decrease or increase leaf size depending on multiple contexts, such as the amount of warming applied, the abiotic conditions in the natural environment, or the presence and type of biotic interactors. Given that many plant trait and plant community property responses to climate change are context-dependent and haven’t yet been well defined, this dissertation aims to unravel some of the complexities defining these responses. In Chapter 1, we apply in situ warming and drought to an early successional plant community. With this chapter, we measure plant volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions to determine how climate change may impact plant communication and stress protection via their chemical emissions. In Chapter 2, we apply long-term in situ warming and herbivory reduction treatments to two unique early successional plant communities in Michigan, USA. To determine plant responses to warming and herbivory reduction between these environments, we measured several different plant traits and community properties in each of the 7 years of the experiment. Finally, in Chapter 3, we investigate how various environmental, experimental, and plant-level contexts define plant responses to warming via a global meta-analysis of passive experimental warming studies. Overall, this dissertation uncovers how numerous plant traits and plant community properties respond to climate warming and drought and determines how various contexts, local to global, contribute to plant responses to warming.
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